


makes the hours easier to bear

by elisela



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eddie Diaz is an amazing dad, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Soft Eddie Diaz
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:22:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25195357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisela/pseuds/elisela
Summary: The deep, soothing voice rolls out of the speaker immediately. “Hey, Buckaroos! Ready for Bedtime with Buck? We have one of my absolute favorites tonight: Where the Wild Things Are. I remember begging my sister to read this to me every night when I was a kid, and I’m so excited to share it with you. Everyone snuggled up? Let’s get started.”Eddie glances over at Chris, who’s fast asleep, mouth hanging open. He hovers his finger over the pause button, but stops—it might be getting close to 2:00am, but he doubts he’ll fall back asleep quickly. Why not listen to a bedtime story? No one’s read him one since he was a kid. He lets his hand fall away, but keeps the tablet propped up on his chest.
Relationships: Christopher Diaz & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV), Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Comments: 294
Kudos: 532





	1. love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [extasiswings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/gifts).



> For Chapel, who knows the value of soft Eddie.
> 
> Cover art by [ronordmann](https://ronordmann.tumblr.com/)

Two months after moving into the house, Eddie finally orders a bed. He hadn’t meant to leave it so long, it was just something he kept putting off in favor of other things. They’d left El Paso with nothing more than suitcases and boxes full of clothes stuffed into every crevice of the truck and hadn’t had the room to accumulate much in their shared room at Abuela’s house, so Eddie’s main concern once he signed the lease had been making sure Christopher had what he needed. Then it was a table for the kitchen and a sofa for the living room, a dresser so he could stop digging through bags to find what he needed, and somewhere in there he’d spent several weekends in a row wandering through Target with a list of things he didn’t even know he needed in a house.

Like hand towels. Who the hell needs hand towels? Eddie did, according to Abuela.

Sometimes, he really misses the military.

So for two months, he’s been sleeping on the floor in his son’s room. He supposes he could have done the same in his own bedroom, but it’s been an adjustment for Christopher, and considering Eddie’s still trying to make up for everything he ran away from, a sore back is a small price to pay for being able to hold his son’s hand as he falls asleep.

Eddie’s not as young as he used to be, though, and eventually, sleeping on the floor becomes too uncomfortable, especially after spending the day running in seventy pounds of gear and carrying a 200 pound dummy through an obstacle course. When it takes him longer to lower himself onto the floor than to get up from it, Eddie capitulates to the inevitable and spends his next Saturday at one of the many mattress stores scattered around the city. 

His sigh of relief as he sinks into the bed that night is short-lived. 

Christopher, as it turns out, is much happier with Eddie on the floor.

“Chris,” he pleads, holding one of Christopher’s hands in both of his, “I promise, you’re safe in the house. We both need some sleep, buddy. Let’s get you back to bed.”

“I just want to sleep with you,” Chris says again.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say yes, to give in and pull his son into bed with him, but the last time he’d talked to his parents on the phone they kept lecturing him about fostering Christopher’s independence, and last thing Eddie wanted to do is fuck up even more and end up with a kid who suffers from a lack of self-confidence.

“We talked about this,” he says. He lets go of Chris’ hand and presses the heel of his palm into his eyes. “I know our routine has been thrown off lately, but you never needed to sleep with me before. What’s going on?”

He wonders if it’s delayed processing; Shannon had only died four months ago, and Chris had seemed to understand it, but the therapist had warned Eddie that he might not have accepted she was gone. 

Chris shrugs. “Maybe you could read me a book.”

Eddie takes a deep breath in place of the groan he wants to let out. He loves Chris, but it’s the middle of the night and he’s dead on his feet from what the academy is putting him through. He’d thought that the last few months of construction work and odd jobs would have kept him in shape, but it quickly became apparent that he had been fooling himself. But, alarm set to go off in four hours for a run or not, Chris needs him, and Eddie made a promise that he’d never let him down again; he’s not about to start now.

He follows Chris down the hallway, switches on his bedside lamp, and peers blearily into the bookshelf. “ _Goodnight Moon_?” he asks, already reaching for it.

“I want _Where the Wild Things Are_ ,” Chris says. He’s already back in bed, snuggled deep under the covers, looking like he’ll fall asleep the second he closes his eyes. 

Briefly, Eddie wonders if he should just crawl into bed with him anyway, but he shakes the thought away as his parent’s criticisms ring in his ears. His fingers touch the spines as he scans through what few books are on the shelf and he frowns. “I don’t see that one,” he says. “Did you leave it in the living room?”

“We don’t have it,” Chris says helpfully.

Eddie sighs. “I can’t read you a book we don’t have,” he says, and one look at Chris’ sleepy eyes and slight pout makes his heart ache. He can’t even get this right—a simple bed time story—so what the hell was he thinking, dragging his kid away from the only home he had ever had? What kind of father is he? He squeezes his eyes shut for just a moment and breathes in again, trying to clear his mind. “What if we found a video?” he asks.

Chris nods, so Eddie grabs his tablet off the desk and powers it on. He sends a quick prayer as he types the title into the YouTube search bar, and feels some of the pressure in his chest melt away when the page loads, showing hundreds of options. He scrolls through the first page, bypassing what looks like movie clips and music videos, and stops on one of a man in a pink shirt holding the book up. 

“Come lay with me, Dad,” Chris says, and Eddie only hesitates a few seconds before climbing into bed with him. It’s still fostering independence, he tells himself, as long as he doesn’t actually fall asleep in here. Chris snuggles into him; it’s hard to resist the urge to pull Chris close to his chest and keep him there, but he manages, tapping the video thumbnail instead.

The deep, soothing voice rolls out of the speaker immediately. “Hey, Buckaroos! Ready for Bedtime with Buck? We have one of my absolute favorites tonight: _Where the Wild Things Are_. I remember begging my sister to read this to me every night when I was a kid, and I’m so excited to share it with you. Everyone snuggled up? Let’s get started.”

Eddie glances over at Chris, who’s fast asleep, mouth hanging open. He hovers his finger over the pause button, but stops—it might be getting close to 2:00am, but he doubts he’ll fall back asleep quickly. Why not listen to a bedtime story? No one’s read him one since he was a kid. He lets his hand fall away, but keeps the tablet propped up on his chest.

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and caused mischief of one kind—and another—”

The light is creeping into the room when Eddie wakes up in Christopher’s bed. The tablet is facedown on his stomach, long since having run out of power, and he’s ended up face to face with his sleeping child. He resists the urge to stretch and half climbs, half falls out of bed—no harm done as long as Chris wakes up by himself, he thinks. He drops the tablet onto the desk as he passes, thinks about trying to go back to sleep, but gives up when he retrieves his phone from the floor of his bedroom and sees that he’s only got thirty minutes before his alarm goes off.

Despite the middle of the night wake-up and the twinge in his neck, Eddie actually feels rested. He’s got about an hour before Pepa comes to pick Chris up for their volunteering session at the animal shelter, which is just enough time for him to get a bodyweight workout in before his run, right after he writes this week’s Target list.

_Where the Wild Things Are_ goes right at the top. 

He reads it to Christopher that night, snuggled up in bed, unable to stop himself from thinking about the man in the video a few times. Eddie’s still not used to reading bedtime stories—Chris doesn’t want them every night, and Abuela had preferred to tell him Mexican fables—he skips pages accidentally, the stiff pages of the new book sticking together, has a difficult time keeping consistent voices, and feels like he’s rushing. His son—his sweet, good son—has never complained, but when Eddie compares what he hears coming out of his own mouth to the man in the video, he knows he’s lacking.

“Another,” Chris says sleepily. “I want _Love_.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow. “I haven’t even heard of that book,” he says. “I know we don’t have it.”

“My teacher read it,” Chris says, yawning. “Can we buy it?”

Eddie believes that a good education is the best thing he can give his child, and that books are paramount to his intelligence, but Eddie is also living off savings and odd jobs. The house is already bleeding him dry, there’s no way he can afford to add regular trips to the bookstore into the mix. “Maybe we can get it at the library,” he suggests gently. “We’ll have to figure out where that is tomorrow.”

“Want it now,” Chris mumbles. “Please?”

Eddie is well aware he’s being manipulated—he’s also well aware that he’ll fall for it every time. “Maybe there’s a video,” he says, leaning over and stretching for the tablet on Chris’ nightstand. “Do you know who the author was?”

Chris shakes his head. “No, the cover is blue.”

Right. Well, how hard can it be to find a video? Very hard. The search query populates several hundred pages of results, none of which look like anyone reading a book. He scrolls through three pages before he gives up and navigates to his viewing history. It’ll take him hours to find anything blindly, and the man reading last night had a soothing voice; he’s sure Chris will find something he wants to watch. “Buddy, pick one of these,” he says. 

Chris’ hand comes up and his small fingers scroll faster than Eddie is ever able to, stopping abruptly with a sleepy smile. “You found it,” he says, and Eddie shifts his gaze from his son’s beautiful face to the screen. There, in a deep green shirt, is the man holding onto a book with a blue cover, _Love_ stretching across the top. “Press play,” Chris whispers, and Eddie feels him sink back into his bed.

“Time for Bedtime with Buck! I hope all my Buckaroos had a wonderful day, and that we’re all snuggled up under our covers. The book I’m reading tonight is really special to me because it’s about something we all want—love. We’re all loved by someone, or some _thing_ —and just know that I love you, too. Sometimes when I read this story I think about love so much that it makes me a little emotional, but that’s okay. Love is a big feeling. It’s okay to embrace that.”

Chris tugs on his sleeve. “Love you.”

“Love _you_ ,” he whispers into his hair, kissing the top of his head. 

"In the beginning there is light and two wide-eyed figures standing near the foot of your bed, and the sound of their voices is love.”

The tears that gather suddenly at the corners of his eyes don’t surprise him at all. 

The weeks stretch on, and Eddie finds himself watching Bedtime with Buck almost nightly, with or without Chris. He doesn’t let himself think about it too much, why he’s so much more comfortable falling asleep to a stranger’s voice than alone, and he especially doesn’t think about why it’s this stranger in particular, with his comforting tone and emphasis on words that sometime send a shiver down to the base of his spine. He _especially_ does not consider the way it makes him feel to hear “and remember—I love you,” at the end of each video, the last thing he hears at night.

Eddie knows he’s lonely. He’s been lonely since he left the Army, since he drove his wife away in the months—years—before she died, since he decided that the best way to deal with the guilt and the pain and the all-consuming feeling of not being enough was simply to shut down and not allow himself to think about it. Any of it. If the guilt threatens to choke him at times, it’s only what he deserves.

But in the stillness of his bedroom, late into the night, he finds that he can close his eyes and pretend the voice from his phone is coming from someone next to him, someone who can guard him against the loneliness and the pressing shame he constantly feels. He pretends that Buck is more than a face on a screen reading children’s books. 

Over time they realize there are certain videos that he and Chris like more than the others—Chris goes for the humorous ones, like _Dragons Love Tacos_ and _Penguin Problems_ (a book that makes him laugh so hard that Eddie regrets letting him watch it before bed, because it takes an additional three stories to calm him down enough to sleep), but Eddie—Eddie’s apparently much more maudlin than he had realized. He favors _Love_ , and _In My Heart_ ; all the sappiest things that he would never be able to verbalize even though the feelings overwhelm him at times. 

It doesn’t take Eddie long to subscribe to the channel, and he starts to anticipate the emails coming through every few days with a new video announcement, starts to look forward to snuggling up with Chris and ending their night listening to Buck. He’s listened to Buck often enough at this point—almost every night for a month—that he begins to think about his voice at other times; when he’s powering through the obstacle courses, when all he wants to do is collapse on the couch after getting home with Chris, when his parents call every Sunday. It hurts to realize that of the two voices in his head that encourage him, that comfort him, the only one he actually knows is his Abuela.

On his last day at the academy, they have a meet and greet with the station captains; he hates this, trying to show himself off, make himself better than his peers, stamping down the discomfort he feels when the words _veteran_ and _silver star_ get thrown around. There are recruits milling about all around him, jostling for space and time with each captain, and Eddie hangs back for a few moments, breathing through the anxiety he feels. Graduation doesn’t guarantee him a job, and although he’s good, he’s not the youngest, not the fastest here. He has the most experience, but he’s aware that for some houses, the captains don’t want recruits coming in who do things their own way.

“Eddie Diaz?” He turns towards his left, hoping he covered his startled reaction well enough, and smiles. “I’m Bobby Nash at the 118, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise, Captain,” he says, nodding. 

“So,” Bobby says, and Eddie braces himself for _I heard you were an army medic_ , but gets “I hear you come from Texas. How’s the change of scenery treating you?”

He blinks. “It’s been good,” he says, some of the weight lifting off his chest. “Chris—my son—and I have some family out here so we haven’t been completely blindsided, but it’s taken some adjustment. Mostly by me, he’s a great kid, but I’m hoping that things will get easier if I get an assignment.”

Bobby’s smiling at him, a small, reassuring look. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine, Eddie. We’ve been down a member for a few months now; I have a feeling you’d be a good fit for our team. Hen and Chim would love someone else with medic experience, but Buck has been needing someone he can really depend on in the field. He’s a good kid, and he’s great at his job, but I’m sure you know the value of having someone you trust out there with you.”

They don’t talk much longer; the captains are supposed to be talking to all of them, so Eddie shakes his hand after a moment and moves on, but the conversation sticks with him when he’s told the next day that both station six and the 118 have asked for him to join them. There’s no hesitation in his response—the name Buck feels like a sign, like Eddie’s supposed to be with this crew. He just hopes that this Buck is as friendly and caring as the one on his phone screen.


	2. nightsong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some people asked me about an update schedule and I am here to tell you that I am just posting this as I write it, straight outta google docs with zero editing. Thank you as always to Lauren for holding my hand and validating me so I stop whining.

Christopher is a good kid. The best kid, if you ask Eddie’s completely unbiased opinion; he’s got nephews and nieces, little cousins running all over Texas, and he knows how lucky he got with his son. Chris is a happy child, he accepts things as they are for the most part, and on most days can usually be found with a smile on his face, lighting up even the darkest corners of Eddie’s heart. 

Today, however, is not one of those days. 

“Chris, I promise, I’ll call you as soon as school is over, okay? And I’ll be home by bedtime, but we really, _really_ need to leave for Abuela’s now.”

Chris is sitting on the bottom step, legs sticking out in front of him in willful defiance of Eddie’s direction to get into the truck. “I don’t want you to go,” he cries. “Abuela said we had to pray for you to be safe and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Eddie pushes down the irritation he feels; she means well, he knows that, but the last thing he needs after sinking his life into being a firefighter is to have Chris worrying about him every day. “I pray for you to be safe every day,” he says, “and it’s not because I worry about you getting hurt, it’s because you’re the best thing in my life. Abuela doesn’t pray because she’s worried, buddy, she prays because she loves us and she wants us to be protected. She prays for you, too. We can ask her when we see her.”

He holds out his hand, hoping it gets Chris off the ground; he hates picking him up and carrying him around against his will, but he’s rapidly running out of time and being late to the station on his first day is not something he can afford. 

“Let’s just go to the park.” Chris says, looking up at Eddie over the rim of his glasses with wide, hopeful eyes. “Maybe I don’t need to go to school today.”

“Christopher,” he says, “if you don’t get into the truck, I’m going to carry you over there, because I can’t be late. We talked about this last night. Please.”

Chris crosses his arms over his chest, and Eddie, sighing, picks him up. 

He’s relieved to see the clock on his dash just tick over to the new hour as he pulls up at the station, takes a moment once he’s parked and out of the car to take a deep breath and try to shake the morning off his mood. His father had always told him that he had one chance to make a good impression, one shot, that was it—whatever people saw first is how they would always see him. So he stands there for a second, reminds himself that he’s capable, he’s got experience, and all he really needs is to be able to get along with his coworkers. He’s not looking for a replacement for the Army, not looking for people who will understand him; he just wants to get along and be useful.

Anything else is a bonus, not an expectation.

If he tells himself that enough, maybe he’ll start to believe it.

The station is nice, bright and airy; people nod to him as he passes, give him friendly smiles, and he can feel himself relax as he walks up to Captain Nash. “Hello, sir,” he says, and Bobby shakes his head and smiles.

“None of that here,” he says, but he shakes Eddie’s hand. “It’s Bobby. The rest of your team should be here soon—though it’s nice to have someone who knows the meaning of _on time_ —why don’t you get changed and throw your stuff in a locker, and I’ll show you around.”

Eddie’s just finished changing in the locker room (glass walls, he notes, bold choice for a coed fire station) and is tying his boots when Captain Nash comes back in, trailed by two others he introduces as Henrietta—”call me Hen, or I won’t be responding”—and Chim, who gives him a knowing smirk when Eddie raises an eyebrow. They’re friendly, more polished around the edges than most of the people he’d served with, but warmer, too, he can see their bond in the way Chim nudges her with an elbow as he leans over to shake Eddie’s hand, in the way she kicks gently at the back of his ankle in retaliation.

“Buck should be here soon,” Captain Nash says, checking his watch with a raised eyebrow, “with a good excuse for being ten minutes late or with coffee, either one.”

“He’s on his way from his DXA scan,” Hen says, waving her phone, “to torture us all with stories about his body fat dropping half a percentage—yes Chim, it _is_ a big deal to him, at least pretend to be interested before you change the subject— _and_ with coffee, Cap.”

Eddie’s good at keeping a neutral expression. It’s necessary, for a medic, to not let anything show on your face; not disgust, not fear, not hope, the worst one of all. Not the crushing disappointment in his chest at Hen’s words, a sudden feeling that takes him by surprise. He knows the type, the guys that are obsessed with their workout and their body fat, the ones who would snort as soldiers would open their care packages and pull out boxes of cookies and bags of candy, _you really gonna eat that, sarge_ , like they weren’t dying for a taste of back home, to have something more familiar and comforting than whatever food was being served up in the mess. Not bad men, necessarily, but not a type that he’s ever been able to find friendship in. Certainly not the type that would read picture books to children they’d never meet on YouTube, and with that thought, Eddie lets the tiny flare of hope he’d kept firmly against his heart die out. 

He just has to get along with him, he reminds himself. 

They joke as they lead him around the station and Eddie finds that it’s easy to fall into a rhythm with them, to laugh with Hen at the innocent faces that Chim pulls when Bobby talks about cooking and cleaning rotations, to exchange a look with Bobby when Chim warns him that Hen regularly hustles the new recruits out of their money at the pool table, to poke through the books on the bookshelf and see if there’s anything he’d be interested in. 

He insists on helping Bobby with breakfast—probably not the best idea given his history with cooking, but it’s ingrained into him to be useful, to offer assistance, and he’s eager to prove himself—and is pulling a flat pack of eggs out of the refrigerator when a loud “yo, Cap!” sounds from downstairs and Hen yells back their location before hissing at Chim to _be supportive_. He cradles the eggs in one arm while pushing bottles and tupperware containers around, looking for the red peppers, stacks them on top of the eggs before grabbing the gallon of milk, turning around and coming face to face with—

Oh.

 _Shit_.

Eddie has spent the last four days having idle daydreams about Buck being _Buck_ , about hearing his voice day after day in his ear and not through a speaker, about working with someone like he imagines Buck to be, kind and caring and _good_ , and now the Buck from his imaginary life is looking at him with a smile that doesn’t quite seem genuine and Eddie can’t stop his heart from hammering in his chest. For all his daydreams, he hadn’t considered the reality of working with the man who reads him to sleep every night, the man who he has dreamt about more than once, the face on the screen who he felt lonely enough to imagine as something more.

Suddenly, the prospect of being in Buck’s shadow day after day seems terrifying.

He almost wishes it was some asshole who was only worried about his body fat percentage and how many grams of carbs he was eating in a day.

“Buck, this is Eddie Diaz, new recruit,” Bobby says, and Eddie tears his eyes from Buck’s face and sets the food on the island before striding over and holding out his hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, praying his face doesn’t give anything away. “Captain Nash said you were one of the best.”

Flattery, he has learned, usually gets him places where politeness isn’t enough. It seems to work with Buck; his face lights up and his mouth becomes less rigid, his eyes crinkle at the corners before he relaxes into the same smile Eddie has come to expect at the end of every video. He doesn’t dwell on the compliment, doesn’t brag or boast, just holds out a cup of iced coffee to Eddie and says, “Bobby told us about you last night so I grabbed you one, too. It’s just black, I thought you could add milk and sugar if you wanted.”

“That’s all I ever order,” Eddie says, taking the cup from him with a grin he doesn’t feel, and Buck makes a disgusted face. Next to him, Chim makes a joke about Buck’s coffee being more like a milkshake and Buck says something about how Chim’s order took the barista a full minute to write down, but Eddie is stuck on the feel of the cup of coffee he didn’t ask for in his hands, water beading down the sides in the sweltering early heat of the day, and the realization that this is the first time in _years_ that someone has done something for Eddie without prompting, without being asked, without it being out of pity, without it being a point in their favor, an action that could be thrown in his face during the next fight. 

His heart is beating a frantic rhythm in his chest, totally out of sync with the voice in his head that’s telling him to get it together, reminding him that good things only last so long and he’s a fool for putting so much thought into what was surely a careless action by Buck, an afterthought to his morning routine—

Except it _was_ a thought, he thinks desperately, it was _intentional_ , this decision—

He blinks, takes a seat at the chair Chim pulls out for him, and tries to focus. Falling apart over a cup of coffee is not the impression he’s going to make on his new team; he can do that on his own, in the darkness of his own room— _without_ Buck’s voice in his ear, this time. 

“Dad!”

Eddie holds Chris close to his chest, pressing a kiss into his curls as his feet dangle, knocking against Eddie’s calves. “I missed you, buddy,” he says, breathing his son in. “I’m sorry I’m a little later than I thought, can I read you a story before bed?”

Chris nods against his cheek; Eddie sets him back down on his bed and reaches for the stack of library books on his nightstand. “Can I pick two?”

The voice in his head that sounds like his mother says no, it’s already past his bedtime and it’s a school night. Boundaries are important, and if he doesn’t set them now, how will Chris know what to expect?

“Of course,” Eddie says. 

By the time he falls into bed, eyes heavy with sleep, he’s read Chris three stories—apparently once you read one Pete the Cat book, you have to read them all—and told a few child-appropriate stories about his day, thankful that Chris is far more interested in hearing about the fire truck than anything Eddie actually did. He wanted to know all about Bobby, fascinated by the idea of being captain of a fire station, and centered his questions around if Eddie had gotten to use the hose or climb up the ladder.

He taps his fingers against his phone, feeling like he’s in a staring contest with the YouTube app that he’d downloaded, fighting with himself over whether or not to open it. He shouldn’t need this sort of comfort, should be used to being alone, should focus on all the good he has in his life instead of laying in the dark and wanting more. And he definitely does not need to continue down this road of building Buck into something he’s not, into focusing all his loneliness on someone he works with now, someone who would probably look at Eddie with derision if he knew what Eddie was projecting onto him. 

Eddie had managed, until the end of the day, to be friendly enough with Buck, who had fallen quiet after their initial interaction and was nothing more than polite afterwards. He’d seemed almost wary of Eddie, like all the inappropriate, misguided feelings Eddie wrestled with nightly were on display, written across his face like a story Buck would read to a camera. Chim had been quick to pull Eddie aside and tell him about Buck’s ex-girlfriend, but hadn’t been quiet enough; Buck had walked around the corner right at the time that Chim was joking that she was eating, praying, and loving her way across Europe, looked at the two of them, and turned right back around. 

He might have missed the insecurity if it hadn’t been for that conversation, might have written Buck off as reserved, or just not interested in anything more than a working relationship, but the longer he spent watching him on calls, the less true that seemed. Buck was clearly good at his job, he’d made good decisions and was knowledgeable, but the way his face had fallen when Eddie had suggested a different tactic screamed of a feeling Eddie knew well. Just as Eddie had been resigning himself back to the idea of a cordial but distant working relationship, Buck had voluntarily put his life in Eddie’s hands.

And then—

He thinks about the smile Buck had given him, shy, pleased, the way his bulky shoulders bumped up against Eddie’s on their way back to the truck, the way he’d pressed his knee into Eddie’s as they demolished a pair of burgers and how he had stolen a handful of fries from Eddie’s tray without a hint of shame.

Eddie opens the app and presses play.

Life likes to throw Eddie curveballs. 

He graduated high school near the top of his class, enrolled in classes at the community college, got through a semester with good grades and started looking into transferring to a university, made a list of scholarships to apply to only to have Shannon show up on his doorstep, holding a positive pregnancy test, tears drying on her face.

His tour was over, he was headed stateside for the last three months of his contract, happy to have made it out of the desert without any lasting damage—until Shannon’s grim face appeared on his screen, until the words “cerebral palsy” came out of her mouth, until the websites of endless information blurred before his eyes.

He was two months away from ending his second tour, looking into using his GI bill for college back home because he’s a damn good medic and he thinks that could translate to something good, something _great_ for his family, and his helicopter crashes.

He’s home; his wife leaves. 

Eddie has stopped expecting good things to happen to him without something coming to even it back out, which is why Buck’s sudden friendship makes him wary. It’s only a matter of time until something happens to upset the easy balance they’ve built. He waits for it nervously, but Buck doesn’t seem to notice; once he hears that Eddie’s new to Los Angeles, he’s ready with a dozen different plans for them on their next set of days off—“but only if you’re interested, I won’t be offended,” he says.

He goes along with them all while wondering what the hell he’s doing; he knows perfectly well that he’s not going to go rock climbing, or bar crawling, or run up the hills of Topanga Canyon on his day off, because he has Christopher. 

Christopher, who he hasn’t said a word about to anyone outside of Bobby. 

He doesn’t know why; Hen has a kid of her own, he doubts Chim would care, and he’s pretty sure Buck loves everyone. He thinks he might be enjoying being a person outside of a father, there’s a possibility of—well, everything. In those few days, he’s single, he’s lighthearted, he worries about nothing. He laughs and jokes with Buck, spends days at his side, learns how to have a friend for the first time in his adult life, even if he’s not being completely open.

Then the earthquake happens.

“After Northridge, FEMA spent $200 million retrofitting every school in LAUSD. Ceiling tiles, lighting fixtures … Eddie, your kid is in the safest place he can be.”

Buck is looking at him so sincerely that the panic in Eddie’s gut loosens; he takes a deep breath and focuses on the job. He’ll get through the rest of the day, get home, and try not to freak Chris out by showing him how worried he is. 

Earthquakes don’t happen in El Paso, he thinks. A tornado or two, maybe, small things that die out quickly in the open desert, but natural disasters are not a thing in his part of Texas, and for a moment he considers moving back, taking Chris somewhere where the earth doesn’t shake apart under your already unsteady feet and bring down buildings on top of your head.

They make it out step by tiny step, and it does not escape Eddie’s notice that Buck is with him the entire time, close enough to touch. It comforts him, the certainty in Buck’s tone when he talks about Christopher being safe, when he jokes that he must have gotten his looks from his mom because he’s much cuter than Eddie could ever dream of being, the way he swings the conversation back around to things that Chris likes doing as they skid along tilted hallways and drop into elevator shafts. 

Buck’s right behind him as he calls Abuela and Pepa to see if they picked Chris up, sitting too close in the truck on the way back to the station as Eddie taps his heel against the seat—gently sliding Eddie’s bag off his shoulder as he fumbled his keys for the third time and steering him towards a Jeep on the other side of the parking lot, joking that he didn’t want to be called in for emergency coverage thanks to Eddie flipping his truck due to exhaustion. Eddie doesn’t have it in him to care; the physical strain of scaling a skyscraper has nothing on the weight of his worry, and it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open as Buck drives them through town.

The sight of Christopher, head thrown back and giggling, lifts his spirits. Lightness comes back to his body as he sinks down and grabs him; he doubts there could be a single thing that could steal this smile from his face, the love he has for his son—

Until they’re halfway out to the Jeep and he sees the impossibly fond look on Buck’s face and realizes two very important things: he never told Chris that he works with Buck, and he never told Buck, well, anything.

“My Dad and I are Buckaroos!” Chris says excitedly as he knocks Eddie’s hands away, pulling himself up into the backseat, and thank God it’s dark because Eddie thinks his face must be bright red. This is how he dies—not at war, not during an earthquake, but having a heart attack in the middle of the parking lot at his son’s school because his kid had blurted out the one thing he would rather Buck not know.

And—he hates it, but he’s drawn to Buck, can’t look away from the inevitable freaked out look on Buck’s face as he processes that he’s worked side by side with someone for a week all without knowing that Eddie had gone home every night and listened to his voice as he fell asleep, grabbed onto the comfort that Buck hadn’t known he was providing and held onto it as tight as he could. But of course—

Buck’s smile is blinding, because there’s no way for him to know that he’s not just a face on a screen that Chris watches occasionally. “Eddie!” he exclaims, looking more awake than he has all day, “dude, why didn’t you say something? Chris, it’s really nice to meet you, can you believe your Dad didn’t tell me that?”

Christopher laughs, tries for what Eddie thinks might be a scandalized look. “I _can’t_ believe it,” he says. “Do you have _Penguins Problems_? Are we going to your house? I had to take it back to the library and I want you to read it to me.”

“Chris,” Eddie says, leaning over to help him click the seatbelt in, “Buck’s had a really long day too—”

“I didn’t get dinner,” Chris interrupts, “could Buck come over for dinner? I got a new book and he can read it to me if he doesn’t have _Penguin Problems_.”

“Done with your old man already,” Eddie says, shaking his head and sighing in the way that never fails to pull a giggle from Chris. He jumps back into the front and pulls the door close. “Buddy, maybe we can swing through McDonald’s and get some food but—”

“ _Please_ , Dad?”

Eddie glances at Buck apologetically, only to see Buck looking back at him, eyebrows raised hopefully. 

“Yeah, _please_ Eddie?”

Eddie presses his lips into a line, blowing a breath out through his nose so he doesn’t laugh. “You two win,” he says, and when Chris starts up an excited stream of chatter about his day from the backseat and Buck listens attentively, making all the right noises, all Eddie can do is lean his head back and smile.

He invites Buck in to eat, considers putting a movie on and asking Buck if he wants to stay, but Chris is clearly tired, resting more and more of his upper body against the table as he picks at his french fries and chicken nuggets. His dinner commentary has ranged from his top ten flavors of ice cream (some of which Eddie is almost certain he has never tried, like huckleberry) to which president he would invite for dinner (all of them, but he’d need a bigger house), and finally shifted to asking Buck every question he could come up with.

“My third favorite fruit?” Buck repeats, brows furrowed. “Interesting. Uh, peaches—no … yeah. Peaches.”

Chris’ head droops, and when he pulls it back up, there’s barbeque sauce on his nose.

“Bedtime,” Eddie says, reaching over to wipe it off; he lets Chris clean himself up usually, but he’s pretty sure his son is three minutes away from falling asleep. “Do you want help getting your pajamas on?”

“No,” Chris says, chair scraping back. “Goodnight, Buck. Can you come over again?”

“I’d love to,” Buck says, and shifts his gaze to Eddie the second Chris disappears. “You didn’t tell me how cool he was,” he says. “I already knew he was cuter, but man, what a great kid, Eds.”

The nickname sends a thrill throughout his body—or maybe it was the easy way Buck had said Chris was cuter, like he may consider Eddie cute, and Eddie needs to stop this line of thinking immediately. “He’s the best,” he agrees. “Hey, Buck—thanks. For everything tonight. You didn’t have to do any of this, and uh, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about watching your videos, I wasn’t sure how to bring it up or if you thought it might be weird. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Are you kidding?” Buck gathers up the trash on the table, shoving it into the empty bag. “I think it’s great. I started doing it because Denny would always ask me to read to him whenever we’d get together and Hen said he liked the way I did the voices. She helped me out a lot in the beginning, you know, with picking out the books and stuff, but it’s fun. Maddie used to read to me when we were supposed to be asleep and I guess I just like the idea that people find it as comforting as I did.”

Eddie doesn’t respond, doesn’t know what to say that isn’t too close to the truth. “I better go make sure he’s in bed,” he says, taking the bag from Buck’s hands. “See you tomorrow?”

Buck smiles at him, reaching out and resting a hand on Eddie’s arm for a moment. “Yeah. I’ll come by and pick you up.”

It’s not two minutes later that Eddie’s phone vibrates with a text; Buck must still be in his driveway, he thinks, seeing his name on the screen with a link. _This might be good for tonight_ , Buck had written, and Eddie opens the video as he turns Chris’ light off and slides into bed with him, waiting for Buck’s voice to come from the speaker as Chris’ head tucks into his chest.

By the time Buck reads “ _sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you. Sing, and the world will answer_ , _”_ Chris is snoring peacefully in his ear, and Eddie’s eyes are starting to close.


	3. wherever you are, my love will find you

Chris is having the time of his life.

Eddie, not so much.

He has his arm around Chris in the truck, keeping the too-large headset from falling over his eyes, turnout draped over his son’s shoulders. Chris is amazed, but his team—Eddie still can’t believe they’re doing this for him. He zones out a little after Buck protests being muted, half so he doesn’t blurt out that he would _never_ want that (he’s still getting over the embarrassment of Buck knowing he—well, they, in Buck’s mind—watch his channel), half so he can work this childcare problem out in his mind.

Living in Los Angeles is expensive, and despite the bonuses he qualifies for, he’s still handing half his paycheck over every month on rent alone. Childcare costs would bury him in debt, which is why he’d passed on Chicago; there was no family out there to watch Chris, no one who could help him out with the weight of being a single father. He’d looked into the programs Chris might qualify for, but as he told Buck while they were driving back to the station, Chris in the backseat clutching several bags full of burgers from In-N-Out, he had no clue how to fill out any of the forms required. He doesn’t even know where to get most of the documentation; the only doctor he’s set up for Chris in town is his physical therapist.

He still feels slightly ashamed of how he’d unloaded it all onto Buck, a steady flow of words coming from God knows where as he outlined his problems—things he hasn’t told anyone, like how damn expensive it is just to make sure they don’t pass out from heat stroke in the house and that he’s pretty sure his truck is past due for some maintenance but he can’t seem to find the time to get it done. A part of him had tensed when he’d finally quit talking, waiting for the judgement, but Buck had just reached over and tapped his thigh twice with the side of his fist and said, “that sounds tough, Eddie. You’re a really great dad though, you know that?”

Chris is talking next to him, saying something in the headset to Buck, who throws his head back and laughs before meeting Eddie’s gaze with a wide grin. 

“Okay there, Eds?”

“I’ve got my buddy with me,” he says, squeezing Chris. “I’ve never been better.”

He’d been worried about talking Chris on the call—there are no guarantees at accident scenes and the last thing he wants is for Chris to see something that will trigger thoughts of his mom, but Bobby had offered to stay with him and Chris was giddy with excitement about being able to ride on a real fire truck, so he’d said yes and hoped for the best. It’s thankfully mundane—Buck lets him show off a little for Chris, throwing a wink in his direction as he says loudly, “ah, I think you might be stronger than me, Eddie, you should do this,” when Eddie jogs back over to the car with the jaws of life.

Christopher, standing on the side of the truck with Bobby’s arm around his waist, looks delighted.

Hen and Chim take over once they get the door open and he waits for Buck to finish talking to one of the officers at the scene, nudging him as they make their way back to the truck. “When did you even get the chance to tell Bobby that we were bringing Chris to the station?”

“Oh,” Buck says, “I texted him when you went in the room to visit your grandma, asked him if he’d mind Chris hanging out if I stayed behind on calls.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow. “You? You hate staying behind. Why would you stay behind for my kid?”

“Uh, because you get to hang out with him all the time? Don’t try to steal my time, Eddie, that’s not cool.” Buck says, and as soon as they reach the truck, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Alright, firefighter Diaz! Time to get some good shots for your social media accounts, show all the family back in Texas what a good time you’re having out here.”

Hands curled in front of his face, Christopher laughs, and Eddie takes a second just to watch the way his eyes light up as Buck settles his own helmet on Chris’ head and makes a big show about finding the best angle.

He’d thought the reality of being man behind once they got a call Chris couldn’t ride along for might change Buck’s mind, but a few hours later they’re in the middle of showing Chris how to use the gym equipment when the alarm sounds and Bobby stops Buck with a look. “Car on fire,” he says. “You’re staying.”

Eddie reaches out to ruffle Chris’ hair and spares a glance at Buck, ready to offer to switch, but Buck looks delighted as he holds his hand out to high five Chris. He’s leading them over to the pull-up bar as Eddie jumps into the truck; as they pull out of the station, he catches Buck’s hands on his son’s hips, lifting him easily to meet the bar.

He feels a pull in his chest to stay, and it has nothing at all to do with needing to make sure his kid is taken care of.

“Eddie, that’s one cute kid you’ve got,” Chim says, pulling off his gloves and tossing them into a trash bag. The weather is cooling as they move through September, but the sun’s been beating down on them for a few hours now as a car on fire turned into a six car pile-up by the time they’d arrived. 

“Gets it from his mom,” Eddie says, wiping the sweat off his brow and checking his phone again. There’d been a text from Buck an hour ago, a picture of Christopher mixing brownie batter with a giant bag of mini M&Ms next to the bowl, which Eddie knew for sure they didn’t have at the station when he left. He’d sent a warning to only let him have one, because Pepa’s due to pick Chris up soon and the last thing he wants after she’d lectured him about finding childcare help is to hand over a child riding a sugar high until bedtime. 

“You’ve been pretty quiet today,” Chim observes. “You know, if you’re worried about Buck watching him, he is pretty good with kids. Not that I have any, but Denny likes hanging out with him, I’m sure Chris is having a good time.”

“It’s not about that,” Eddie says. He leans down and grabs their bags, throws them over his shoulder and follows Chim back to the bus. “I’m just trying to figure out what I can do with him while my abuela is recovering.” He cringes as the words are out of his mouth; he doesn’t mean to make it sound like his kid is a burden, because it’s the furthest thing from the truth, but—

“You should talk to Hen,” Chim says. “Hey, Hen!” Eddie startles, not realizing that Chim meant right _now_ , but Hen is already making her way over to them, oxygen canister in one hand and her med kit over her shoulder. “Is Karen still picking Denny up after school? Eddie’s worried about having someone to watch Chris.”

“Denny takes the bus home, but we could make it work for a few days,” Hen says, looking over at him. “Let me talk to Karen tonight, but I’m off Monday and Denny loves having friends over, so he’d be thrilled.”

By the time they get back to the station, Bobby and Hen have bought Eddie an extra two days to figure everything out, and that along with his scheduled days off means he’s only got to find a way to cover Wednesday, and idly he wonders if Bobby would mind Chris coming in again for a few hours after school, and has to force himself to shut down that line of thinking. Bobby might have said he had family here, but that doesn’t mean Chris is their responsibility, and Eddie already hates being seen as someone who can’t get his life together.

Pepa is at the station when they arrive back and he pulls her into a hug, accepting the warmth that comes from the affectionate way she rubs his arm when they pull back. “Chris is in your captain’s office,” she says, adding, “recording your friend reading a book for his bedtime story tonight” before Eddie can start to wonder exactly how he charmed Buck into that one. Bobby might be pretty relaxed, but his office is his space, not a place where they all hang out.

Buck and Chris are still hidden away after he introduces Pepa around and gives her a quick tour, so when she sits down at the table with Bobby, a cup of coffee in her hands, he makes his way to the office and opens the door slowly.

Chris is sitting cross-legged in a chair, his tablet steady against his knees, both hands wrapped around it. He’s got it pointed at Buck, who has one hand waving in the air while the other holds a book up. “By now of course you’ll wish you’d brought a hollow stick or a bird’s nest or some sparkly rocks for show-and-tell instead of an alligator. By now you’d rather have some _dirt_ instead of an alligator. You’ll wish this alligator would _just go home_ ,” he reads dramatically, and Eddie slides into the room and eases the door shut.

Turns out, listening to Buck read in person is much, _much_ better than listening to his YouTube channel. He giggles helplessly sometimes, snorts over words and occasionally makes side commentary that causes Chris to laugh, and finishes the book by giving an over-exaggerated shudder and saying “ugh, _alligators_.”

“Hey Buck,” Chris says, stopping the recording, “what if there was an alligator here?”

“Then we’d have to call 9-1-1,” Buck says seriously.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Chris says, patting his arm and leaning over to look at the frying pan. “I really like cereal, too.”

Eddie cringes as the edge of the metal spatula scrapes the bottom of the pan, but somehow still does not manage to make a dent in the hardened crust of egg and bread stuck to the bottom. So much for french toast. “Yeah, better get it out,” he sighs, and drops the pan into the sink. Hopefully soaking it will help, he’s not the biggest fan of attacking cookware with steel wool. 

His phone rings as they’re cleaning up after breakfast; Chris abandons his position at the dishwasher to reach for it, connecting the call before Eddie has a chance to ask who it was. Family, he thinks, so he finishes up the dishes and reaches for a sponge to wipe down the counters. Chris has always liked to update his grandparents and abuela on his life no matter when he’d last talked to them before he would hand the phone to Eddie, so it’s not until he says “do you want to come with us? Dad can pick you up, you can sit in the back with me if you want,” that he realizes Chris is definitely not talking to someone in the family.

“Chris,” he says, reaching for the phone only to have his son ignore him and twist away. “Christopher. Who’s on the phone?”

“He wants to talk to you anyway,” Chris says with a sigh, holding the phone out. “Can he come with, Dad, please? He says he’s never been.”

Buck’s name is on the caller ID display, and Eddie, who had been looking forward to some one-on-one time with his kid, gives in immediately. “Hey,” he says, putting Buck on speaker, “you know you’re welcome to come if you want, but no pressure. I was going to take him to the beach but Hen mentioned that the museum was free and I thought it might be fun.”

“It sounds _awesome_ ,” Buck says. “There’s a courtyard you can eat at, and if you’re sure I wouldn’t be taking up your time I can make some sandwiches and we could have a picnic.”

“Taking up our time? My kid asked you and I asked you, Buck, what more do you need? Should I hire a skywriter?” Chris laughs, and Eddie shoos him away, plucking at his pajama top and raising an eyebrow. “Sandwiches would be great. I’m fine with anything, but Chris only eats turkey.”

“And not the fancy kind,” Chris says, leaning in towards the phone.

Buck laughs. “What’s that, only the fancy kind? What kind of fancy are we talking, buddy? Yesterday I read about this cheese that’s twenty years old, you want some of that on there?”

Chris gags, coughing dramatically. “No! Just turkey and mayonnaise, and _no_ mustard.”

“What about some sun-dried tomatoes?” Buck continues on, like he hadn’t heard Chris’ demands. “Oh, I have a nice olive tapenade here, Cap said it was super fancy, I bet you’d love it.”

“Buck!”

“Okay,” Eddie breaks in, shaking his head and gently pushing Chris towards the doorway, “enough torturing the kid, Buck, or he’s not going to have time to get dressed before we come pick you up. How does an hour from now sound?”

“Perfect, gives me time to go get some bread from the store, I’m thinking something with roasted garlic—”

“He’s not in the room anymore,” Eddie cuts in, smiling. “Roasted garlic bread sounds good to me and he’d eat it because he’s a good kid, but you’re probably better off with white bread, man. Hey, you know if you don’t want to spend your afternoon with us, I get it, it’s not as adventurous as anything you’d probably rather be doing.”

There’s a few seconds of hesitation where Eddie’s heart sinks—he remembers all the plans Buck had thrown out about their days off, rock climbing, hiking, paintball—he’s only known him for a few weeks, but sacrificing a day off just because Chris had asked him to go to an art museum sounds like something he would do. “I thought it sounded fun,” Buck says, his voice quieter than it had been before. “But—”

“I just wanted to make sure,” Eddie says, because hearing the insecurity in Buck’s voice makes him look at the conversation in a different way, “because we could skip it and go to the beach or something if you’d rather.”

“Oh,” Buck says, and then, “no man, Hen’s mentioned it before and I’ve wanted to go, I just felt weird going on my own, she says it’s pretty family-focused.”

“You can always come with us,” he says before he can stop himself. Thank God they’re having this conversation over the phone so Buck can’t see the way he blushes, but seriously, there’s got to be some sort of limit to the number of embarrassing conversations you can have with a sort-of friend and Eddie’s pretty sure he’s hit it two weeks into knowing the guy. “Anyway, I’ll see you in an hour, I gotta go make sure Chris is getting ready,” he says, and then hangs up like a coward and hopes that an hour is long enough to get his impulsive, lonely heart under control. 

“I’m really happy you invited me, Chris,” Buck says, leaning forward across the picnic table to steal a chip from the bag in front of Eddie. “That installation with all the roofing material was seriously cool.”

Chris nods solemnly and Eddie snorts. He remembers the exhibit—something about invoking entropy and chaos, inter-generational and multi-ethnic viewpoints—he’s still not sure what it was supposed to be about, and he’s pretty sure Buck doesn’t either, but it didn’t stop him from examining the entire thing, museum guide in hand while they all took the advice about framing the art, walking around and looking at it from different angles, holding up magnifying glasses from a basket in the museum lobby at close and far distances, hands on their chins in thought as Buck asked questions about texture and geometry from the guide.

Eddie doesn’t bother being self-conscious about his parenting decisions when it’s just him and Chris; the looks from strangers stopped bothering him long ago. He’s always going to get them, both because of Christopher’s CP and because he doesn’t think there’s anything more important than spending meaningful time with his son. He’s missed out on too much already, and if what’s good for Chris is examining artwork while lying on the floor with his hands making a rectangular frame in front of him, he’s going to do it.

And it’s not that he expected Buck to comment on it, he just ... hadn’t expected Buck to follow along. But Buck had taken one look at the way Eddie read the sign encouraging people to view the art from different angles and laid right down on the floor with them, then boosted Chris up to his shoulders and asked him to describe what he saw—and tried to do the same with Eddie, laughing as he got his hands around Eddie’s waist and picked him up a few inches off the ground while Chris howled with laughter. 

Eddie thinks he might feel the heat from Buck’s hands imprinted on him for the rest of the day. 

“You can always come with us, Bucky,” Chris says, and Eddie grins at the way he unintentionally mirrors what Eddie had said earlier. 

Buck’s cheeks are pink as he says, “I’m just glad you answered when I called, buddy,” which is when Eddie realizes that he has no idea why Buck called in the first place, and says so. “Oh, Maddie needs some help moving and I was wondering if you’d be free Monday morning after you drop Chris off at school. We don’t work until the afternoon so I was hoping—I’ll buy us lunch after—” he says, as if Eddie doesn’t already owe him a handful of favors after he’d stepped in and cleared Chris coming to the station the day before. 

“I drop Chris off at 8:00,” Eddie says. “Text me your coffee order, I’ll bring some.”

Any chance Eddie had at _not_ falling in love with Evan Buckley was blown the second that he realized what was happening—that Buck wasn’t setting _him_ up, he was setting _Chris_ up. With the finest home health nurse in Los Angeles, who had stood at the table with a stack of papers a foot tall while Eddie had been stuck, caught up by the soft, happy expression on Buck’s face. 

And oh, Eddie is in trouble.

Eddie can deflect a lot of his feelings as loneliness and the somewhat childish thrill he has at having a friend, but he’s not entirely sure he can explain this away. He’d tried for two years to be capable in El Paso, to be what Chris needed, only to have his parents jump in and take over every time there was a bump in the road. He can’t deny needing their help, considering he was barely making ends meet while working 70 hours a week, but he always resented it. He shouldn’t need anyone solving his problems for him, hates people telling him what he should be doing, what he _needs_ to be doing, and it’s something he’s been thinking about since Buck had introduced him to Carla at the beginning of the week. 

It should have made him mad.

It _would_ have made him mad, if his parents had done the same, if they had brought in someone to take care of his son because he didn’t have the time. 

But Buck had made no demands, just explained that Carla knew the system and she’d offered to help Eddie navigate it at the very least in exchange for Buck helping her husband fix some of the tiles on their roof, which, Buck said, he would have done anyway.

Of course he would have, Eddie thinks, because that’s who Buck is. He had listened to Eddie talk about what he needed without judgement, and he had handed Eddie the tools to solve the problem himself. Buck has a goodness to him that is unparalleled in most people his age; despite clearly struggling with a broken heart, he focused on helping someone he’d only known for a few weeks for no personal benefit. 

Buck is one of the kindest, nicest people Eddie has ever met, which is why Eddie absolutely cannot let himself fall in love with him—someone like Buck deserves better than what little Eddie has to offer him.

Five KitKat wrappers, three empty soda cans, a bowl of popcorn kernels, a lone peach ring half buried in a couch cushion—and that’s just what Eddie can see from his spot by the door. Buck, for his part, has enough sense to look chagrined, an apology already spilling out of his mouth when Eddie holds a hand up, stopping him. “This is the first time you’ve babysat, isn’t it,” he says, not actually bothering to ask.

Buck grimaces. “Maybe I should have told you that before?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says faintly, as Chris comes around the corner, his face lighting up when his gaze lands on Eddie. 

“Dad! Buck and I had so much fun! We played Legos and went to the bookstore and Buck bought me three news books and then we got ice cream for lunch—“

Eddie tunes the rest out for his own sanity, nodding and mentally calculating exactly how long he has before his kid has an epic meltdown. He’s going to guess the tears will start flowing about an hour before bedtime. When Chris finally finishes recounting his day, Eddie inhales deeply and prays for strength. 

“It sounds like you had fun,” he says, kneeling down to Chris’ level and trying to moderate the resignation out of his tone, “but I have a feeling you know that you shouldn’t have eaten all that junk food, especially after eating ice cream for lunch.”

Chris just looks at him, wide-eyed, apparently knowledgeable enough to keep quiet, even though he looks like he’s bursting to say something. Eddie stands up and sighs, makes an aborted motion to pinch the bridge of his nose, and surveys Buck’s living room one more time. “Alright,” he says, “Chris, start cleaning, you know better than to leave someone’s house like this. Buck, you’re following us back home—Chris is a good kid, but any kid this hopped up on sugar is going to be a nightmare at bedtime and that’s not something I’m interested in dealing with. You made these decisions, you’re dealing with the fallout.”

Buck stares at him for a second, then, shoulders slumping, nods.

“Hey,” Eddie says, reaching out and catching Buck by the arm as he turns away, “I’m not mad, okay? I—you’re so good with him that I didn’t realize I had to set rules. That’s on me. He’s happy, in one piece, fed—sure, junk food, but he’s a kid—you’ll learn the rest.”

“We didn’t _only_ have ice cream for lunch,” Buck says. “There was some pizza, too.”

“Oh, much better,” Eddie says. “Guess it’s extra vegetables at dinner to balance it out.”

Christopher’s goan could be heard from space.

He didn’t fully think about the implications of having Buck follow them home, though, because the next six hours are exactly the type of domestic daydream that Eddie used to allow himself to indulge in back when Buck was a stranger who smiled gently and said “I love you” to him every night: he takes Chris on a walk, insists on cooking them dinner before pushing Eddie out to play a game with Chris while he cleaned up.

Eddie _wants_. 

And if that wasn’t enough, they’d ended the night together in Chris’ room, sitting side-by-side on the floor while Buck sifted through a stack of library books he and Chris had picked out that day and Chris carefully considers each one before reaching out and tapping one with a bear on the cover. 

“Oh,” Buck says, “great choice. I might cry, though. There’s a lot of love in this one.”

Eddie’s fooling himself if he thinks there is any universe in which he can sit so close to Buck that he can feel the heat from his body while Buck reads “my love is so high, and so wide and so deep, it’s always right there, even when you’re asleep,” and _not_ fall desperately in love with him. 

So he’ll allow that for himself. He’ll tuck it into his heart, keep it deep in his chest, pull it out when he needs the comfort that Buck brings to him, the first sense of peace he’s felt since he left the army. He’ll love him deeply, but quietly—and he’ll keep it to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Alex made an amazing gifset](https://kingbuckley.tumblr.com/post/623211395223355392/wherever-you-are-my-love-will-find-you-nancy) using the book "Wherever You Are, My Love Will Find You" by Nancy Tillman and I highly encourage everyone to look at it and tell her how gorgeous it is.


	4. crankenstein

Buck leaves gold in his wake.

It’s the drugs, Eddie knows that; he’s seen trails of purple and pink from balloons all day, a path of red following the truck out of the hotel parking lot, but it’s hours later and the only thing he is aware of is the way Buck glows, a halo of golden light like an aura wrapped around him, blurring his edges.

Eddie can’t stop staring at him.

“Eddie?”

Shit.

He blinks and looks up at Maddie—their official babysitter during their comedown, after it was clear they weren’t going to be able to work and hanging around the station was a liability. Athena had offered to call someone for Eddie, but he’d had enough presence of mind to decline the offer, and Buck had immediately latched onto the idea of Eddie coming home with him. 

“Sorry,” he says. “Zoned out for a minute, can you repeat that?”

“How are you feeling?” Maddie asks again. She’s holding her hand out, and after a moment Eddie stretches his out hesitantly, and she rolls her eyes before grabbing his wrist. “Pulse seems normal, any nausea? Shakiness?” She rests the back of her hand against his forehead briefly and he shakes his head. 

“My mouth’s dry,” he says, and she nods. 

“I’ll get you two some water,” she says, “but I think you’re probably fine. My shift starts in an hour, would you be okay staying here for the night?”

“We’ll be fine, Maddie,” Buck says. His phone is in front of his face, thumbs tapping rapidly. “I’m starving, Eddie, are you starving? Doesn’t matter, I’m ordering pizza.”

“And wings,” Eddie says, stomach growling as if on cue. 

Buck pulls the phone down and grins over at Eddie. “You’re so smart,” he says, happily, and Maddie snorts. 

“He’s still a little in the clouds,” she says quietly. “It’s why I’d rather someone stayed with him tonight.”

“That’s what he gets for shoving food in his mouth like it’s the last thing he’ll ever eat,” Eddie says, remembering how Buck had jammed two brownies in his mouth before holding the box out to the rest of them. “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

“I owe you,” she says, and then smiles and adds, “again, it seems.”

“Hey, this is a lot easier than moving,” he says, grinning back at her. “You don’t owe me anything, I’d be hanging out with him anyway.”

Maddie pats him on the shoulder before she gets up, kisses Buck’s forehead as she says goodbye to him and gathers her things. Her last words are a warning—“drink _water_ , boys, and plenty of it, no beer,”—and then they’re alone, and Eddie can’t come up with anything better to do than to lean his head back and stare at Buck while they wait for the food. 

So that’s what he does, and he tells himself that Buck’s too high to notice, anyway. 

Eddie wakes up with a headache at the base of his skull, courtesy of ignoring Maddie’s advice the night before. He sits up, resting his head in his hands for a moment before he realizes that Buck is standing next to him, holding a glass of water out. There’s a bottle of acetaminophen on the table and Eddie reaches for it, shaking two into his hand. He’s pretty sure the headache is just from dehydration, but a couple of painkillers won’t hurt.

Buck sits down heavily next to him, letting out a sigh. “I feel gross.”

“Eating an entire pizza and a pound of wings in one sitting will do that to you,” Eddie says. He can hardly talk—he’d downed his own box of wings just as quickly as Buck did, but he’d gone slower on the pizza, getting distracted by the smear of buffalo sauce on Buck’s cheek and how badly he’d wanted to lick it off. 

He’s blaming the drugs, because in the cold light of day, he can admit to it being a little disgusting. 

“We should go workout,” Buck says, rolling his head over to look at Eddie. “You have running gear in your work bag?”

“You’re gonna puke if you run, Buck.”

“As long as you have shoes, we’re good,” Buck says, ignoring him and standing up. “My feet are bigger, but you can borrow my clothes if you need.”

Eddie sighs. “I’ve got shoes, but I swear, if you throw up—”

There’s a spare LAFD shirt that resides in the bottom of his bag; he shoves it underneath his work pants and catches the t-shirt Buck throws at his head from down the hall. What Buck doesn’t know, Eddie’s heart reasons with his mind, won’t hurt him. 

Buck makes it ten minutes into their run before he’s bent over a trash can, gagging, and Eddie rubs his back tentatively after a moment, handing over his water bottle when Buck uses the rest of his to wash his mouth out. 

“I told you,” he says, and Buck claps him on the back. 

“Yeah, but I feel _great_ now,” he says. “Come on, there’s a park up ahead and we can refill these.” Buck does look better, and they settle into a rhythm as they run, recounting their unintentional trip the day before—“everything was so much brighter,” Buck tells him, “like it all glowed. It was really beautiful, man”—and making plans for the weekend. Buck extends an invitation to listen to him do a read aloud at Children’s Book World—“I do it once every few weeks, dress up in the gear and bring those plastic helmets for everyone, it’s a hit. I’m gonna see if Bobby will let me bring the truck this time”—which makes it easier for Eddie to mention the haunted house Chris has been begging to go to.

“No jump scares,” Eddie puffs as Buck picks up the pace. “A kid-friendly kind of haunted. I hope. Wanna come with us and see what all the fuss is about?”

“Sure, but if I’m too scared to sleep, you better stay up with me all night,” Buck laughs.

“If you’re too scared to sleep, Chris will definitely be too scared to sleep, and then we’ll have bigger problems,” Eddie says. “Friday night? We can get dinner and watch a movie after, go with you in the morning.” 

The second it’s out of his mouth he cringes; it sounds almost like he’s setting up a date, and an extremely presumptive one at that, but Buck just knocks an arm against his and says, “sounds good. Hope your couch is comfortable.”

He’s not too sure how comfortable it’ll be for the night, but he’ll buy a new one if it means waking up to Buck in his house. 

Christopher’s excitement is palpable when Friday comes around; he’s out of bed twenty minutes early, eyes bright and happy as he appears at Eddie’s bedroom door. 

“Dad,” he says, “it’s Halloween at school! And haunted house day!”

Eddie, who had spent the end of the last shift assisting a pregnant woman give birth in the middle of a haunted house, smiles back at him more brightly than he feels. “Sure is,” he says. “What are you doing up so early, buddy?”

“I need help with my claws,” Chris says, holding his fingers out in front of him and baring his teeth.

“No claws until after school,” Eddie reminds him, and Chris sighs. “Hey, c’mere,” he says, scooting backwards and patting the edge of the bed, pulling Chris towards him as soon as he’s laying down. “I have a surprise for you,” he says. “A few of them, but I’m only going to tell you one right now.”

Chris shakes his shoulders, an awkward dance against Eddie’s chest. “Or,” he says, “you could tell me _all_ of them.”

Eddie digs his fingers into Chris’ sides and waits out his laughter. “Do you want to hear the surprise about school, the haunted house, or tomorrow?”

“School,” Chris says quickly. “Because it’s first.”

Not the way Eddie would have gone, but he can’t argue. “I have to meet with some people this morning,” he says, “but your teacher said I could come hang out with you this afternoon at your Halloween party, if you want me too.”

“Will you dress up, too?” Chris says. He twists until he’s facing Eddie, and Eddie can’t help but pull him close and kiss his forehead. Chris is still young, but every day he wonders if it will be the last where he’s so open to receiving affection, and Eddie’s not sure what he’s going to do on the day that becomes true. 

Cry, probably. 

“I’ll dress up if I have time,” he says, mentally flipping through his wardrobe for options. He’s got some camo left over that would work, although he loathes the idea of dressing up as a soldier. If Chris wants him to wear a costume, he’ll figure something out. Maybe those stupid black and white camo pants that Sophia had gotten him as a joke when he’d re-enlisted and had written down Fort Drum—the furthest he could get from his parents and still remain in the country—as one of his preferred locations. “To hide in all that snow,” she had said, laughing when he scowled at her. 

He still wonders, sometimes, what would have happened if they’d chosen to send him there; he would have taken Chris, would have had to struggle through being a soldier and father—would have never made it to Los Angeles, most likely. Instead, he wound up as far away as Fort Bliss, a whole seventeen minutes from his parents house. 

“Can we get breakfast from McDonalds?”

“Not unless you don’t want your surprise tonight,” he says. He hates that he can’t give Chris everything he wants—it’s hard not to feel like a failure when all his kid asks for is a breakfast sandwich and he has to mentally review his budget to see what he could make work. But they’re four days from payday, he has to buy tickets to the haunted house, he’d told Buck they could go out for dinner—

It adds up. 

The earlier wake-up means they have time to linger, though, so he scrambles eggs and lets Chris throw in a handful of cheese at the end, keeps it a little runny like Bobby had showed him at the station so he can spread it on toast, and uses a cookie cutter to make them into bats and ghosts. 

Eddie’s no Pinterest parent, but he can do a thing or two. 

Christopher looks like Christmas came early when Eddie slides the plate in front of him, and Eddie forgets all the guilt he felt over McDonald’s when Chris curls his hands in front of his mouth and squeals. “It’s cool!,” he says, right before his eyes widen and a sneaky smile appears on his face. “Maybe it’ll even taste good, Dad.”

“Hey now,” Eddie protests, setting his own plate down and ruffling his son’s hair, “that’s not nice.”

“Sorry,” Chris says, though he looks completely unrepentant as he picks up a ghost and takes a big bite. He hums thoughtfully, then smiles wide as he gives Eddie a thumbs up and an unwanted view of partially chewed food before shoving another bite into his mouth.

Eddie’s exhausted by the time he swings back around to pick Chris up at school before the final bell rings. An hour long interview for the Durand School and three solid hours filling out paperwork and wrestling with his feelings of inadequacy wears on him more than a long shift does, and he’d thrown in lunch and a party with twenty-six frenzied third graders into the middle of it. 

He’s ready to collapse, but Chris is buzzing with excitement over the reveal of his next surprise, asking so many outlandish questions that Eddie starts to worry that the idea of going with Buck and getting dinner won’t be well received. He buys himself an hour of silence by shuffling Chris off to his room to do his homework and spends the time cleaning, trying to make sure it’s presentable enough for Buck—Eddie still feels the compulsive need to seem put-together, despite Buck already knowing what a mess his life was. 

His phone rings while he’s in the middle of folding clothes, and Buck’s on the other line, talking before Eddie has a chance to finish saying hello. 

“How’d the interview go?”

Buck isn’t the only one who knew he was touring Durand today; Eddie had told his parents (hoping to impress them, a little, something that had failed when his mom had looked the school up while they were on the phone and had listed all her doubts over their ability to meet Christopher’s needs), abuela and Pepa, and the rest of the team; but Buck _is_ the only one who’d called to ask him about it—as soon as he got off shift, if the sound of the siren blaring behind him is anything to go by. 

“Couldn’t wait the hour to find out in person?” he teases, kicking his door closed and putting Buck on speaker. He hadn’t told Chris about the new school yet, not wanting to get his hopes up before Eddie knew if it was a possibility.

“Too important to wait,” Buck answers. Eddie hears the Jeep start up, and Buck adds, “come on, Eds. Tell me everything.”

So Eddie does. He tells him about the adapted playground, the small class sizes, the focus on arts and sciences alike—everything he’d heard on the tour, he recounts faithfully to Buck, who makes encouraging noises whenever Eddie falters. 

“When are they going to let you know?” 

Eddie hesitates. “They extended an offer,” he says.

“That’s great, man!” Buck exclaims, but when Eddie doesn’t say anything, he pauses and adds, “why don’t you sound like that’s great? Was there something you didn’t like?” 

“No, it’s great,” Eddie says. He dislikes admitting it, and some of the words stick in his throat, but he’d already spilled all his financial issues to Buck when abuela broke her hip so he takes a breath and tells him about how the scholarships don’t cover all the tuition, how he’d spent hours going through the paperwork Carla and brought over for grants and benefits but even with her help, it will take weeks to get approved or hear if Chris qualifies. “So don’t say anything to him,” he finishes. “I don’t want him to get excited if I can’t figure out how to cover tuition.”

“It’ll work out,” Buck says confidently. “Carla’s some kind of genius, I’m telling you, Chris will be charming all his new teachers by Christmas.”

“Hope so,” Eddie mutters, and clears his throat before changing the subject. “Hey, you want us to come pick you up? You were staying here tonight, right?”

Sometimes, Eddie doesn’t think things all the way through. Like the time his son said, “I’m old enough to go a haunted house,” and Eddie had spent a few hours on the internet to find something that seemed suitable, but clearly hadn’t done a great job at reading the reviews for the current year because if he had, he would have closed the site out and found something new. 

So now they’re twenty steps into the “family-friendly” haunted house, and Chris is trembling against him. “I’m fine,” he says, but he leans more heavily on Eddie. 

Eddie pulls him to the side, kneeling down; a moment later, Buck is right next to him, one hand on Chris’ shoulder, the other settling into the small of Eddie’s back. It’s a small comfort, but he’ll take it. “Hey,” he says, reaching out and pulling Chris close, “you know, it’s okay to be scared, buddy. I’m not a fan of clowns either, but we have a choice—we can stay and let ourselves be scared because we know we’re safe, or we can leave and go get some dinner before we go home and watch Hocus Pocus.” 

“How do we know we’re safe?” Chris whispers. “Ashley says clowns steal kids to eat them.”

Eddie remembers Ashley from the classroom party earlier in the day; a sweet looking girl, dressed as Alice in Wonderland—but clearly, looks had been deceiving. “You think I’d ever let my kid get eaten by a clown?” He looks over at Buck and winks. “Pretty sure these clowns aren’t eating anyone, but that’s why we brought Buck. We’ll just push him in front of us and run.”

Buck’s jaw drops. “ _Wow_ ,” he says. “And to think I was gonna take you guys out for a really nice dinner tonight. Didn’t realize I was just clown bait.”

It does the trick; Chris giggles a little, pushing his glasses up from where they’d slipped down his nose when he’d pushed his face into Eddie’s shoulder. “That’s not nice, Dad,” he says. Eddie watches as he tries to push his mouth into a frown but fails when Buck pokes him in the stomach. “Buck will protect us. That’s his job.”

“Pretty sure his job is to fight fires,” Eddie says, “but you’re right, Buck would never let anything happen to you.”

“Or to your dad,” Buck says. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you both safe, Chris.”

By the next morning, Chris has re-written the haunted house to be the coolest thing he’d ever experienced, which Eddie learns after he finally gets out of bed and makes his way to the kitchen, where Buck is standing over the stove, shirtless, stirring something around in a frying pan while Chris chatters away on the phone, a glass of orange juice in front of him. 

He’s pretty sure he only stares at Buck for a moment or two before he swallows down the longing that runs through his veins. “Who’s he talking to?”

“Maddie, she called to see if I wanted to go to lunch with her and Chris asked to talk,” Buck says, looking over his shoulder with a smile before turning back to the stove. “You sleep okay?”

“Should be asking you, you were the one out on the couch.” Eddie moves next to him and looks in the pan, thinks about how easy it would be to slip his arm around Buck’s waist. He settles, instead, for nudging him with his hip. “What’s this?”

“It was supposed to be an omelet but I’m not too good at those yet, so it’s a scramble,” Buck says, making a face. “Bobby lied when he said it was easy.”

“Looks good though,” Eddie says, and Buck looks over and smiles at him. 

He could get used to this; Buck in his kitchen, soft and happy in the morning light. Eddie imagines how it would feel to wrap his arms around him from behind and lean in, press his face to the inviting space between Buck’s shoulder blades and rest there. Buck holds the rest of him so well that it’s not hard to picture having that type of easy affection with him. 

“Need me to do anything?” 

“Toast?” Buck asks. “But only if you want, I don’t mind doing it.”

“I got it,” he says, and gives himself one press of his hand to Buck’s back, one point of contact for his fingers to memorize.

Chris, when he hangs up the phone, is thrilled to learn they’re going to the bookstore with Buck, and Eddie promises to take him to the library afterwards so they can get a new pile of books, already aware that Chris will want to run wild in the bookstore. 

Their morning is calm, domestic—Buck adapts to it easily, joining them for their morning workout and weaving himself seamlessly into getting Chris ready for the day. Eddie has to point out Chris’ faked helplessness to him, laughing when he goes into his son’s room after cleaning the kitchen up to see Buck on his knees, tying Chris’ shoes. 

“Oops,” Chris says with a giggle when Eddie scolds him lightly, and Buck shakes his head. 

“I can’t believe my little buddy lied to me,” he says, and Chris puts a hand to Buck’s cheek and apologizes. 

They trade time getting ready, and Eddie feels a slight sense of shame when he spends an extra few minutes in the shower getting himself off, thinking about Buck on his knees, looking up through his dark lashes, wondering if he’d make the same kind of moans he does when he’s had his first cup of coffee in the morning, small and quiet, if his fingers would leave bruised circles on Eddie’s thighs as he took him deeper. 

He can’t quite meet Buck’s eyes when he leaves the bathroom. 

“Can we call Buck?”

“We just spent the last day with Buck,” Eddie says, putting the book down on the nightstand and reaching for the next one. “What else could you possibly have to tell him?”

“I have to tell him goodnight,” Chris says, squinting at Eddie without his glasses. “That’s what you do with your best friend.”

Eddie reaches out and runs a thumb over Chris’ cheek. “Best friend, huh? I thought I was your best friend.”

“You were, but grandma said you were my dad and couldn’t be my best friend,” Chris explains, and Eddie feels a spike of irritation at the words. “I was going to find a best friend at school, but then I met Buck. Are you sad?”

His first instinct is to brush it off, but—“maybe a little,” he says, leaning down to kiss his son’s forehead. “I liked being your best friend.” 

“But you’re my dad,” Chris says. “That’s better.” Eddie got so lucky with this kid he doesn’t know how to breathe sometimes. No matter his feelings what his feelings are regarding his parents and Shannon and all the shit he had to go through just to feel like he was capable of taking care of Chris, he can’t deny that together, they raised a kind and compassionate child, and he’s the one who’s on the receiving end of that every day. “Buck can be your best friend, too,” Chris adds. “He’s a good one. If you tell him how nice he is, he’ll buy you ice cream.”

Eddie laughs. “No using your powers for evil,” he says. “I’m gonna have to have to talk to your best friend, I think.”

Chris shakes his head. “I won’t do it,” he says, and Eddie reaches down and grabs his hand; Chris laughs when his crossed fingers are revealed and Eddie makes a triumphant noise. “I _promise_ ,” he says. “Can we call him?”

“He’s at his sister’s,” Eddie says. “Let’s watch a video instead, okay?”

They watch Buck read _Crankenstein_ , a new video he put up for Halloween, and Chris growls along whenever Crankenstein does, making his hands into claws like Buck does on the video. And then, because Eddie is a sucker and his son has a cute face, he takes a video of the growling and sends it to Buck, who must check his phone right away because by the time Eddie’s finished tucking Chris in, there’s a video waiting for him in return. 

Buck’s sitting next to Maddie, one arm around her shoulders, and they growl together at the camera before Maddie giggles and Buck smiles and winks. “Night Chris,” he says. “Call me in the morning, buddy.”

Halloween comes and goes, and they fall into an easy routine with Buck. He comes over on Friday nights and sometimes they’ll pick somewhere from the list of free things to do in Los Angeles that Eddie had found and spend their time exploring parts of the city, but more often they stay in and watch movies or play games, eating take-out and building extravagant ice cream sundaes that they rarely finish. 

And just as Eddie’s comfortable with it, just as soon as he starts to think he’s able to contain his desire for Buck and the life he’d built in his head with him, their next shift starts and ends with heartache; first his—

Every time Buck so much as flinches, Eddie feels his muscles contract, ready to pull him up by the line he’s holding in his hands. He has to tune out the words Buck is saying, can’t focus on that when he needs to be alert, but the loneliness and the hurt bleeds from Buck’s voice and Eddie hates it—hates that it’s the first time he’s hearing about it, hates that someone could look at Buck and treat him like that, hates that Buck went so long thinking he deserved it enough to keep at it.

But he can’t care about that right now, can’t think about it, can’t let a single bit of his attention stray from the conversation taking place in front of him so long as Lola is pointing a gun at Buck’s chest.

It doesn’t end as poorly as his brain is convinced it will, but that doesn’t stop him from breathing slowly in the truck afterwards, staying quiet while Buck recounts the first time he’d had a gun pulled on him while bartending (if this is going to be a reoccurring theme in his life, Eddie isn’t sure his heart will survive).

—and then Buck’s—

“You did what you could,” he says quietly, hand on Buck’s elbow to stop him from getting in the truck. “He didn’t want to live without his husband, Buck, I don’t think this is a bad one.”

“I know,” Buck says. He doesn’t move out of Eddie’s grasp. “They should have gotten more time,” he says finally. He looks down and Eddie follows his gaze to a handful of pictures in Buck’s hand. “You think it’s okay if I keep these?”

He thinks about the way Buck had sat with Thomas in the ambulance, hand on his back to comfort him while Eddie rested a sheet over his husband’s body, about the quiet concentration on Buck’s face while Thomas talked to him. “I think he would be okay with that,” he says. “You want to come over after our shift is done?”

Buck turns away from him and hops in the truck, settles into his seat and pulls on the headset. “Nah, I’m going out to get some coffee. Remember that girl from the earthquake, Ali? She called and asked if I wanted to meet up.”

—and then Eddie’s, again. 


	5. cry, heart, but never break

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always thank you to my wonderful Lauren who is the world's greatest friend and makes all of my writing better. This chapter ... was not supposed to go like this but Eddie had different ideas so here we are.

It turns out, Buck dating Ali doesn’t change much when it comes to how much time he spends with Christopher. Eddie’s a different story—Buck is slower to return texts at times so Eddie quits texting him at night altogether, and there are times Eddie will invite him over to ask if he wants to grab lunch after their shift and Buck will turn him down with a vague “I already made plans.” 

But he still flings himself down on the couch next to Eddie every Thursday at the start of their shift, comparing notes about what events are free the next night, what Chris has been asking for, what their back-up plan will be if their shift is too exhausting to drag themselves out the next night. Eddie had worried that his habit of sneaking away in the station to call Ali would carry over to their Friday nights, but Buck’s phone remains firmly in his pocket except for photo opportunities, of which there are many, and always lead to a spirited discussion with Christopher over which are the _best_ photos to post to Instagram. 

Eddie saves every one that Buck posts.

And he still stays over more often than not, reading the books Chris picks out for him—he’s insisted that Chris is his “market research”, so story time with Buck is usually a lot longer than it is with Eddie—he still stays up late with Eddie and pretends to watch movies while they talk, trading stories or answering bizarre questions from lists that Buck finds on the internet until they fall asleep, and making breakfast with Chris in the morning. 

It’s the most comfortable routine Eddie has had in years, and he’s terrified of it. 

Buck talks a lot about the perfect gift for Christopher in the run up to Christmas. He sends Eddie a constant barrage of links: LEGO sets, robots, fort making kits, an endless amount of books. Eddie tries to talk him down, tells him that what Chris talks about most is the time they all spend together, their Friday nights and Saturday mornings are what he’s most excited about.

He’s still afraid that Chris will end up with a mountain of gifts under the tree, because he knows Buck still has poor impulse control when it comes to Eddie’s kid. 

“Okay, so this one is a laser shooting game—”

“No shooting games.”

“What about this solar system planetarium? It glows in the dark and when you put it in the sun it rotates around—”

“He’s more into the ocean right now,” Eddie says, scrolling down to the description of the set, and laughs when Buck grabs his phone back and starts scrolling again. “Buck,” he says, putting his hand over the screen and forcing it down, “just get him those books you were talking about and promise to take him to the aquarium or something. He likes spending time with you. My family will send him enough crap, I promise.”

Buck pushes his hand away and brings the phone back up. “There was also this stomp rocket set I thought was cool,” he says, switching to a new tab and turning the screen towards Eddie.

“Think about that for a moment,” Eddie says, and a second later, Buck’s face falls. Eddie shakes his head and sighs. “He wants this Star Wars alarm clock,” he offers. “Looks like Darth Vader. I haven’t looked it up so if it’s too expensive, please skip it.”

Buck’s eyes light up, and a minute later he’s got the phone back in Eddie’s face, Darth Vader staring at him from an amazon page. “This one?”

“Yes,” Eddie says after he glances at the price to make sure it’s not too unreasonable. “That one.”

“Got it,” Buck announces after a moment, and shifts his legs so he’s leaning in towards Eddie. “Okay, what do you think about this—”

Eddie groans. “You wanna come see Santa with Chris and me?” he asks, searching for anything that will get him out of this endless spiral. “We were going to go on Saturday night, what if we just turn Friday into an all-weekend kinda thing?”

For a second, he forgets about Ali, forgets that Buck likely has better plans, and the words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. But Buck just grins over at him and says, “sweet, I’ll bring my X-Box, I can’t handle that Playstation of yours. That’s the reason I always lose, you know, the controls are different—”

“Your nose is growing, Buckley,” Hen calls from the kitchen, and Eddie chokes a laugh back when he sees the outraged look on Buck’s face. 

“The look on your face,” Hen wheezes, “when Buck held the nose up—you had to have seen crazier things than that, Eddie. I’ve _been there_ for crazier things than that.”

Bobby’s shaking his head, and Eddie makes a face as they walk up the stairs to the loft. “I just don’t get why he had to look _excited_ about it,” he says, thinking about the look on Buck’s face when his head had popped up over the table and he’d held up his hand, the end of the waitresses’ nose pinched in between his gloved fingers.

“Do we need to wait before we start dinner, or do you think you’ll be okay?” Bobby says, and Eddie rolls his eyes. 

“The nose wasn’t the problem!” he protests, glaring good-naturedly at his team—his team minus Buck, who had disappeared as soon as they pulled into the station, cell phone raised briefly above his head with a short wave. “Who flies a drone around in a busy restaurant anyway? That was just asking for something to happen.”

“Could have been her eye,” Chim says, nodding, and Eddie cringes. “What’s for dinner, Cap?”

“Whatever Eddie comes up with,” Bobby responds, and—

“I’ll take the number six,” Hen tells him, eyebrow raised. 

“Thirteen for me.” Chim slides into a chair at the table and reaches for the bowl of pretzels in the middle. “Extra hot mustard, and tell them not to go easy on the spice. I’m not Cap over here, I can handle it.”

“Eddie’s _cooking_ , not ordering out,” Bobby responds. “You two don’t need to do this to him every week.”

It’s Eddie’s least favorite day—kitchen duty. He’d rather restock the ambulance a thousand times, spend every minute of downtime rolling the hoses, wax the truck until it glowed in the dark than have to cook a mediocre dinner for his team. He should have asked for food to go when they were at the restaurant. “Chinese sounds good,” he hedges, and Bobby shakes his head. “Grilled cheese it is, then.”

“Bobby, you saved us from Buck, please, _please_ help this poor man,” Hen pleads teasingly, or maybe not, Eddie still can’t tell sometimes.

Thankfully, Bobby steps in to help him, gently taking the sliced cheese out of his hands and returning it to the refrigerator, directing Eddie to pull out various containers of pre-chopped vegetables—one of Buck’s favorite things to prep when they have downtime, if only because it makes it easier for him to snack all day long—and walking him through how to make stir-fry. Buck shows up twenty minutes later, joining Chim’s story about Maddie and her Christmas-aversion easily, the two of them discussing the sudden change from what Buck remembers about her and what could have brought it around, which Buck blames squarely on her ex-husband (ex? Eddie’s a little confused about it, but Buck has stayed uncharacteristically silent on the topic and he hasn’t asked) but won’t say why.

“How’s Ali, Buckaroo?” Hen asks after a lull in the conversation, and Eddie hates that he moves slower, stops making so much noise with finishing dinner so he can hear everything he has to say. 

“Fine?” Buck says, looking confused. “She’s in New York right now, probably asleep. Why?”

“Figured it was her on the phone,” Hen says.

“Oh, no, that—I have a few apartments to look at tomorrow,” Buck says, “because apparently I’m wearing out my welcome at _someone’s_ house—”

“Maybe if you didn’t workout before dawn—”

“Maybe if you didn’t want to take up both your apartment and my sister’s—”

“Dinner’s ready,” Eddie interrupts, and is thankful yet again that he only has one child because he could not handle this kind of bickering every day of his life. 

Buck shoots him a smile and reaches for the bowl of rice he’s holding, starting to scoop some onto his plate. “Anyway, Ali found a few places and we’re going to check them out tomorrow after I pick her up from the airport.”

Eddie’s heart squeezes in his chest; it shouldn't be that big of a deal, it’s Buck’s life, and he’s been telling himself for weeks that he needs to be ready for when this relationship gets more serious. But moving in together? That’s a lot more serious than Eddie had thought it was, unless Buck is just being impulsive, which—

“No, she’s got her own place,” Buck is saying, looking earnestly at Bobby. “I need to do this right, you know? I thought I waited long enough with Abby and look how that turned out. She’s just helping me find a place. And it’ll be nice to have somewhere to go where neither of us has roommates.”

Eddie tunes the rest of the conversation out, nods when someone looks over to him, laughs when everyone else does, but mostly sits with the hollow feeling in his chest and the dread in his stomach that tells him that what he has now with Buck has an expiration date, that even if they’re not intending to move in together, Eddie knows how this will go—Buck will get his own place, they’ll spend most of their time together over there because Ali has a roomate, and slowly, it’ll become their place.

He knew it would happen. He knew that, eventually, Friday nights would stop, that he’d lose that time—he just didn’t think it’d be so soon. 

Christmas morning dawns early, and Eddie has pushed off every attempt from his parents to come back to El Paso for the holidays. He’s half afraid they’ll show up at abuela’s later that night, an unwelcome surprise that Eddie certainly does not want to deal with on Christopher’s favorite holiday. But he has time to worry about that later; for now, he makes sure the gifts from Santa are under the tree and the cookies that his son had carefully laid out on a plate are gone. 

Chris is not a natural morning person—he’d thought all kids were, but his son prefers to linger in bed, to trudge along in the morning until after he’s had his breakfast and perks up, so much like Eddie that it makes his chest ache at times. It’s never bothered him, and he’s thankful for it on days like this; while most parents are up at the crack of dawn with children shrieking with excitement, Eddie wakes up at his normal hour and is mixing waffle batter (from a box, but still good) in the only mixing bowl he owns. 

Chris is delighted with his presents from Santa: an adopted sea turtle from the wildlife foundation and a new snorkel set that Eddie is pretty sure will be a disappointment when Chris realizes there’s nothing to see except sand, but that he puts on right away and demands Eddie takes his picture to send to their family.

And Buck.

Eddie’s pretty sure his kid is out to get him.

Chris takes the phone from him while he’s making them waffles—he’d learned two weeks into being home from overseas that while he was a disaster at pancakes, waffles were harder to fuck up, given that all he had to do was wait for a green light to come on the machine—tapping away slowly, pecking at the keyboard and occasionally asking Eddie to spell a word for him.

“Dad, can Buck come over?” Chris is looking at him expectantly when Eddie sets the plate of waffles in front of him, fingers poised over the phone that’s sitting on the table. “He says he has gifts for me.”

Gifts.

Plural.

Eddie’s going to kill him.

“He’s going to Maddie’s, buddy,” he says, sitting down and pushing the syrup towards Chris. “Remember? We talked about it a few days ago, Buck’s going to come over tomorrow to see you.”

Chris sighs, and for a moment, Eddie gets a glimpse of what living with a teenager will be like in a couple of years. He’s not entirely sure he likes it. “He says he doesn’t have anything to do,” Chris says, pushing the phone towards Eddie and grabbing for the syrup.

Eddie scrolls back up through their conversation, which is a lot of Buck complimenting his snorkel and talking about all the cool stuff he’ll see in tide pools and Chris sending goofy emojis and—yep, asking Buck to come over. He hesitates, reaching over to stop Chris from using the entire bottle of syrup on two waffles. Chris shouldn’t have asked, not after Eddie had made it clear that Buck would come over the day after, but—maybe it’s not so bad to indulge him on Christmas, and Buck had said he would if it was okay with Eddie, so he just types _sure, come over_ and hits send without trying to overthink his parenting decisions.

Buck, thankfully, is holding just two colorfully (yet poorly) wrapped boxes and a thick envelope when he shows up at Eddie’s door, Santa hat on his head that Eddie is mostly sure he stole from the station’s toy drive a month prior. “Ho, ho, ho,” Buck booms out, grinning, and Eddie doesn’t have time to respond before Chris is squeezing between his body and the door frame, and Eddie watches as Buck’s face lights up. “Merry Christmas, buddy!”

“Merry Christmas,” Chris says, and the grin on his face squeezes at Eddie’s chest. “Buck, I got you something!”

Maybe Eddie shouldn’t have invited Buck over; the look on his face is almost too much for him to handle. He looks good when he’s happy, younger and softer, and at that moment, Eddie would do anything to keep him looking like that. It’s too much, almost—he wants to reach out, wants to feel Buck’s smile against his thumbs and under his lips. 

They don’t wait long to exchange gifts; Chris is too excited, reaching under the tree for the box with Buck’s name on it as soon as Buck sits on the couch. “Open it,” Chris says, pushing it at him. 

“Before you open yours?”

“At the same time,” Chris decides, and Eddie is surprised when Buck holds one box out to Chris and sets the other on his lap. 

“I didn’t really get you anything,” he admits, thinking about the card sitting on top of what Chris has picked out. “I’m sorry, Buck, my family usually just does stuff for the kids, I—”

“Slow down, Eds, that’s not what Christmas is about,” Buck says, “and uh, I’m not sure you’ll be too excited about that anyway.”

The sound of wrapping paper being ripped open takes over the room, then Chris’ excited gasp when he sees the Darth Vader alarm clock, and Eddie lifts his eyes from the tool set he’s unwrapping to watch the way Chris leans himself against Buck’s side and gazed up at him happily.

“Now I can wake up before Dad,” he says, and Eddie groans. He turns to Eddie and sticks his tongue out, then reaches for the box. “Oh, boring,” he says when he sees the tools. “You can share my alarm clock if you want.”

“Generous,” Eddie teases, poking his son in the side. “Look, there’s a picture of you in here, too,” he says, pulling out the picture of Chris standing in front of the fire truck, Buck’s helmet crooked on his head, printed onto a canvas. 

“Wow,” Chris says, running his fingers over it. “That’s _cool_. Can it go in my room?”

“No stealing gifts from your dad,” Buck says, meeting Eddie’s gaze and grinning. He’s holding up the mug Chris had painstakingly painted for him at the art cafe, red fire truck on the side with Buck’s name below it. The fire truck—well, it looks more like a red rectangle with tires, really, but Eddie hadn’t wanted to help, sure that Buck would like it better if it was entirely Christopher’s creation. “This is so cool, Chris, I’m gonna keep it at the station.”

Chris stops opening the envelope Buck had handed him and frowns. “No, you can’t,” he says. “It’s for here. Dad and I have one, too.”

It’s—a lot, the look on Buck’s face, the feeling of his heart beating so wildly in his chest. “There’s, uh,” he says, picking the card up from the table and handing it to Buck, “one more thing.”

In the time it takes Buck to open the envelope, Eddie has planned a hundred things to say in case it’s too much, a dozen ways to deflect and at least three excuses for overstepping boundaries. But they all die in his throat when Buck catches the gold house key as it slides out of the car and turns towards Eddie with a small, pleased smile on his face. “Thanks, Eddie,” he says. 

Eddie opens his mouth to tell him he better not knock anymore only to be cut off by his son’s sudden shout of “Disneyland!” and he blinks and looks down at the plastic gifts cards that Chris has clutched in his hand. 

“You can take anyone you want,” Buck is saying, “well, you have to take your dad, but—”

“When can we go?” Chris interrupts. “You and me and Dad, when can we go?”

It’s just after two in the morning when Buck calls; Eddie’s not asleep, probably won't be for some time. Life had—surprisingly—been going well for him: Chris was thriving in his new school, Carla was a godsend, work kept him busy (and entertained—how many firefighters can say they helped move a shark from the freeway to the ocean?), and so far he’d managed to not completely fuck up his friendship with Buck by blurting out that he was in love with him, that he had _been_ in love with him for a while, and that he so far wasn’t seeing any way to make that stop. 

Not that he had tried very hard. 

His parents were even leaving him mostly alone, so Eddie probably should have known something was going to happen that would make it all blow up in his face. 

He sends the call to voicemail, along with the next three. 

Buck knows something is wrong, he’d known it from the second Eddie had walked into the station three days ago and quietly changed out of his uniform and into gym clothes, went straight to the gym and started beating on the bag like it had personally offended him. It’s just—he doesn’t know what to do with this sudden onset of grief, of guilt, doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that it had been the first anniversary of his wife’s death and he didn’t remember until Chris had refused to get out of the truck at school and started crying that he didn’t want Eddie to die, too.

He picks up on the fifth call. “I’m trying to sleep, Buck.”

“No you aren’t,” Buck says. “Look, Eddie, before you hang up on me, I’m not going to make you talk, okay? I’m here if you decide you want to talk, but that’s not what I’m calling about.”

He laughs, humorlessly, because there is absolutely no reason for Buck to be calling at a quarter past two—repeatedly—unless he was going to try to get it out of Eddie. It was all he had done for the past several days during their shifts, a constant stream of talking punctuated but quiet, soft reassurances that Eddie could _talk_ to him, maybe if Eddie just told him what was wrong, Buck could _help_ —

Well, unless Buck had a time machine he wasn’t telling anyone about, there was no helping this. Eddie doesn’t even know how to verbalize half of what he feels, a gut-wrenching combination of regret and sorrow over his marriage, his nearly-finalized divorce, the guilt he carries that he somehow made it out of a war zone and Shannon had died half a mile from home, suitcases in the car to start her new life—

—and the shame, the incredible amount of shame he carried from the _relief_ he had felt when he realized he would never have to tell Chris that his mother didn’t want him, that she couldn’t handle thinking she had _damaged_ him, like he was something that had been tossed around and bruised during transport instead of the most perfect child Eddie had ever laid eyes on—

—shame from when he read the fucking letter she had left behind promising to love him from afar and thought, _at least you’re not here to break his heart anymore_.

“So you’re up in the middle of the night for no reason?” he asks, flopping over onto his side, pulling himself out of the brief amount of comfort he had started to feel. 

There’s a long pause and Buck says, “I’m up because Chris messaged me earlier, after he was supposed to be asleep.”

Eddie sucks in a breath and holds it, but Buck doesn’t say anything else. He’d set up messaging on Chris’ tablet so he could send texts and pictures to his grandparents, but he’d never used it for anything else—he didn’t even know he _could_ message Buck. “I’ll figure out how to fix that in the morning,” he says, heart racing, unsure how to ask what Chris said without sounding overbearing or like an asshole. 

“I don’t care if he texts me, Eds,” Buck says. “I just thought you should know that he’s worried about you. He asked me to keep you safe at work.”

He’s almost afraid to ask. “Is that all?”

“Yeah,” Buck says. “I swear, Eddie, I’m not keeping anything from you, I wouldn’t do that.”

He knows. Buck is incredibly upfront when it comes to Christopher, faithfully reporting to Eddie everything his kid says that he thinks Eddie might want to know about, and Eddie doubts he’d start lying now, especially when he could—and will—check the message history to see for himself. 

He’s been struggling, the last three days—not just over Shannon, but over whether or not he should tell Buck, if he should own up to his considerable part in the destruction of their relationship, if he should confess that he threw away the first and last letter she ever wrote to her son rather than hand him Shannon’s admission that she would rather abandon him than work towards being a better parent, if he should tell him that there’s a small part of him that hates her for putting this all on him, if he should admit that he’s glad his son will never know she didn’t want him because she died before Eddie could tell him.

He hardly understands how he feels about it; he can’t expect anybody else to. Still, when he opens his mouth to say goodnight, he says, “His mom died a year ago. He did this right after, too, he was worried that I’d get into a car accident, or get hurt at work. I’ll talk with him again and tell him—”

“Eddie,” Buck interrupts, “don’t be mad, but I promised him I’d watch out for you. Not that I think you can’t handle yourself, I know you can, you’re way more cautious than I am, but I think it made him feel a little better.”

Maybe if Buck hadn’t been _Buck_ , the person Eddie was pretty sure would be the first to throw himself in front of any of his team members to make sure they didn’t get hurt, he would have been mad, but Eddie suspects that Buck hadn’t promised Chris anything he wouldn’t have already done. “Yeah, well,” Eddie says, trying to keep the roughness out of his voice, “it always makes him feel better to hear from his best friend. Thanks.”

The line is quiet for a few moments before Buck clears his throat quietly. “Well—try to get some sleep, okay? I’m here if my best friend—either of them—needs me. Night, Eddie.”

He says goodnight, hangs up, and presses his face into his pillow, resisting the urge to climb out of bed to get Chris’ tablet and check the messages. He’s going to have to find a therapist, he thinks; he had one in El Paso, but Chris had seemed fine up until a few days ago, and Eddie had never bothered setting up appointments, because what was the point? His kid already had physical therapy every week, was already getting pulled to one doctor’s appointment after another to set up providers and get the documentation Eddie had needed to qualify for services, and now Eddie was going to have to add one more thing to his week, one more place for him to be, one more burden to hand to someone else because his work schedule doesn’t allow for consistency.

He’s on the sixth page of children’s mental health service providers in Los Angeles, trying to find one he doesn’t dislike on sight, when a text pops up from Buck. He clicks it, only meaning to tell Buck to go to sleep, because it’s three in the morning and he has no reason to be up so late. It’s just a link, but there are three dots underneath that appear and disappear several times. Eddie waits them out, knows Buck’s habit of typing and deleting several times before he finally sends a message, and after another minute, the words appear.

**Buck** : this is for Chris   
**Buck:** but its also for you   
**Buck:** goodnight, Eddie.

He clicks the link. It opens up a video on Buck’s page, but it doesn’t have all the effort Buck usually puts in; the title is all lowercase with the word “heart” misspelled, there’s no description, no Buck smiling at the camera in the beginning, just a book sitting on top of Buck’s comforter.

Eddie presses play.

It becomes immediately apparent why he sent it for Chris when Death sits down with the children at the table and explains why it’s their grandmother’s time to go; Buck clears his throat as he reads “ _some people say Death’s heart is as dead and black as a piece of coal, but that is not true. Beneath his inky cloak, Death’s heart is as red as the most beautiful sunset and beats with a great love of life_ ,” and Eddie wonders if he’s about to cry, a question that’s answered when Buck sniffles and continues on.

“ _Once upon a time, so long ago that only I can remember, there lived two brothers. One was called Sorrow, the other Grief. Woeful and sad, they moved up and down their gloomy valley. They went slowly and heavily, and because they never looked up they never saw through the shadows to the tops of the hills. And at the top of the hill, there lived Joy and Delight. They were bright and sunny and their days were full of happiness._ ”

Eddie’s not aware that _he’s_ crying until a teardrop lands on his phone screen, right where Buck’s thumb is on the video, and he wipes it away before pressing his fingers into the corners of his eyes to stop.

“ _Now they met, and Sorrow fell in love with Delight, and she with him. It was the same for Grief and Joy. Each couldn’t live without the other._ ”

He misses parts after that, the words weighing heavily on him while he thinks about the implications of this book and Buck saying it’s for him, too, wonders what Buck had realized after Eddie told him about Shannon, if he had pieced together all the little things Eddie has mentioned over the past several months, if he looked back on the last three days and had read Eddie’s behavior better than he had wanted Buck to. He’s so in his head about it that he almost misses that Buck’s finished reading but still talking until he hears him say, “ _It’s okay if you’re sad, or if you’re mad, because losing someone can do funny things to our hearts. I know I say this on every video, and I really mean it right now_ — _I love you guys._ ”

Eddie falls asleep on his fifth time through. 


	6. just in case you want to fly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A HUGE thank you to my sweetest zee (tkreyesevandiaz) for kindly and patiently answering my 600 questions about shit that happened in canon because my memory is awful and I block out any hurt that is inflicted upon Evan Buckley because my heart can't handle it.

Eddie doesn’t do the whole talking to people in hospital beds thing. For one—Chim needs to rest and recover, not listen to Eddie talking his ear off, and for another, Eddie’s not entirely sure what he would say. 

_Sorry you were stabbed by someone you thought was your friend._

_Hey, don’t worry about Maddie, Buck went running off after her and Athena, for some reason, let him._

_So, did you catch the score of the Kings game?_

He’s so sick of hospitals. Chris’ surgeries, his own surgeries from being shot, Shannon’s death—he’s had enough of being in a hospital room in the last few years to last a lifetime. 

He can’t even give updates about the search for Maddie, because Buck is understandably not answering Eddie’s texts, and Eddie doesn’t dare message Athena. All he has to offer is his silent company, so he takes up residence in the chair beside the bed, pulls out his phone, and starts scrolling. 

He’s in the middle of leaving irritating comments on his sister’s Instagram photos—payback for all the times she’s done it to him—when Hen walks in the door, carrying coffee and bagels. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes and accepts a cup when she holds it out, and tries to give her his chair only to be waved off. Somehow, it’s become morning; he checks his texts just in case he missed getting one from Buck, sees nothing, and ignores the impulse to send another. 

“How’s he doing?”

“Surgery went well,” he says, even though both he and Bobby had given that reassurance several times in the group chat the night before. “Just waiting on him to wake up.”

“Well, you know he loves his sleep,” Hen says. She drags a chair from the door over to the bed and sits beside him, handing over food and giving him a look until he takes it. “I feel like we were just here for the rebar incident, and now he goes and gets himself stabbed.”

“He pulled through that,” Eddie says, shrugging, “he’ll pull through this. Have a little vacation from work, maybe do some PT—”

“Have a massive amount of trauma to work though,” Hen says, raising an eyebrow.

“I was getting to that,” Eddie says. “He’ll be okay.”

There’s a long pause before Hen says, “if Maddie—”

“We can’t think like that,” he says immediately. “Buck and Athena will find her, she’ll be okay. Buck’s been teaching her self-defense—”

“You and I both know—”

“We can’t think like that,” he says again. _He_ can’t think like that, because right now, all he knows is the desperate, terrified look on Buck’s face, the red around his eyes, the way his hands had shaken in his lap as he sat with Eddie in the hallway. If Maddie isn’t okay, then Buck won’t be okay, and Eddie refuses to entertain that possibility. He can’t think of Buck—exuberant, beautiful Buck—as anything other than joyous; the few times he’s seen otherwise have already broken his heart. Buck could survive Abby; he doesn’t think he could survive his sister being murdered. 

“I gave you a key,” Eddie says, stepping aside to let Buck in. “You know, that small silver thing you use to get into a house?”

“I thought it might just be for emergencies,” Buck says. He doesn’t move from the doorway, shifts his weight from foot to foot until Eddie raises an eyebrow and pulls him in by the arm.

“It’s for whenever,” Eddie says. “I thought you’d be Maddie’s shadow for a few days, everything okay?”

“Got kicked out,” Buck says, cutting across the living room and falling back onto the couch. “Apparently I was hovering and she doesn’t need me looking over her every minute. Guess that’s Chim’s job now.”

Eddie watches the way he swings his hands wide as he talks, the scowl that mars his face, and feels an odd sense of gratitude that Buck came to him—because he needed comfort, a distraction, Eddie doesn’t really care, he just watches Buck sink further into the couch and realizes that for once, he can give something back. “You wanna spend the afternoon with us? I can go grab some take-out if you can watch Chris for a few minutes.”

Buck blinks. “He’s not at school?”

Jesus, Buck must not have been sleeping well, if at all the last few days. “Not on Sunday, Buck,” he says. “He’s in his room reading.”

The haste with which Buck jumps off the couch is almost comical. “Yeah, sure Eds, I’ll hang with him.” And just like that, Eddie’s forgotten in the living room, Buck calling Chris’ name loudly as he walks down the hallway. 

He picks up beer on the way to Buck’s favorite Thai place—not remotely near his house, but he’s gotten two pictures from Buck in the thirty minutes it takes for him to get there, so he doubts his longer absence will be missed—orders enough that he won’t have to cook the next night, either, and swings by the store again on the way home to get ice cream after he passes a park and remembers the way Buck had complained about Bobby not letting him bring an ice cream cone back to the station on their last shift. 

The living room has been transformed by the time he gets back; the couch cushions are on the floor along with the mattress from Chris’ bed, every pillow and blanket they have piled onto the middle except for the one that’s stretched between two dining room chairs on either side, weighted down by a stack of books. Chris is missing, but Buck’s stretched out across the pile, scrolling through movie options on Netflix, images going by so quickly that Eddie doubts he’s even seeing them.

“Nice fort,” he says, and Buck looks up at him with a small smile.

“Yeah, Chris said you guys used to make forts when he missed his mom,” he says, “and it made him feel better, so he thought it would help me. He’s such a good kid, Eddie.”

The way Buck says it makes him uncomfortable; Chris is a great kid, but he doesn’t get to take a lot of credit for that. “Is it working?”

Buck’s expression closes back off, and Eddie resists the urge to sigh. “I’m fine,” he says. “Maddie’s fine, I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine,” Eddie says. “Your sister was—”

“Whatever you got smells good,” Buck says, and Eddie knows if he pushes, Buck will find a reason to leave, or to keep Chris in front of him like a shield all night. So he lets him turn back to the television screen, and by the time Chris comes back carrying a stuffed rabbit, Buck’s settled on Big Hero 6 and Eddie has laid out cartons of Thai food and resigned himself to finding dried rice stuck to the blankets at the end of the night. 

He’s handing out egg rolls when Chris shoves his rabbit into Buck’s hands. “That’s for you,” he says. “You can take him home with you for a little bit, until you’re not sad.”

Buck stays on edge for weeks; he hides it while they’re on shift, but Eddie can see it in the way his eyes fall to Hen’s side, where Chim should be, in the way he holds himself too still when he realizes he’s been fidgeting, in the way he pulls out his phone on Friday nights and messes with it before putting it away, only to repeat the process again thirty minutes later. Eddie thinks it’s Ali until they’re out getting cupcakes with Christopher and Buck puts his phone down without locking it when he goes up to order for them, and Eddie looks down to see Maddie’s face hovering above a spot on a map. 

He doesn’t say anything, but he suggests a beach day for the next Friday and invites the entire 118 and their families along, deals with Christopher’s pouting when Buck’s attention is split between so many people, and is surprised when Buck’s headlights shine through the windows fifteen minutes after they get home and he lets himself in, clutching a grocery bag filled with bags of candy, popcorn, and soda. 

Buck stays the weekend.

And the weekend after that.

Eddie wonders if he should be putting down firmer boundaries, if he shouldn’t be stretching their time together out; Buck’s with Ali, he seems to be happy, and Eddie’s only asking to get his own heartbroken if Buck keeps staying weekends and coming over early on Wednesdays to eat breakfast with them and take Chris to school before dragging Eddie out for a workout or a hike. 

He thinks about it; the words are on the tip of his tongue— _hey, I can’t do Friday_ or _Chris and I are going to hang out by ourselves_ —but he also knows that canceling on Buck means telling Chris, and his son deserves to spend time with the people he loves even if Eddie feels a heavy weight settle on his chest the moment Buck leaves, even if Eddie sometimes still feels like he’s drowning.

And Buck—Buck seems happier with each passing week, his smile a little bit more natural after he opens Eddie’s door and lets himself in, a little brighter each time he stays. So Eddie swallows the words and his longing, and continues to let Buck in. 

“Hey, you guys ready for—” he stops, drops his keys on the table by the door and frowns. He’d talked to Buck before he left that morning for his diving certification about setting rules down for Chris but had braced himself at the same time for a repeat of the last time Buck had babysat. But there’s no laughter, no candy wrappers scattered around, no shopping bags filled with new toys that he doesn’t need, and no Christopher. It’s just Buck in the living room, sitting on the couch and scrolling through his phone. 

He takes another few steps inside and peeks down the hall and spots Chris’ closed bedroom door; Buck’s standing up and pushing his phone into his pocket when he turns around. 

“I’ll see you at work tomorrow,” Buck says, and Eddie steps in front of him before he can get to the door.

“So this is weird,” Eddie says, shifting when Buck tries to get around him. “Want to explain?”

Buck looks at him and sighs. “He’s mad at me, so he’s in his room reading. Or drawing pictures of me with my face scratched out.”

“Little dramatic,” Eddie says, taking a step forward, and then another one when it causes Buck to move back towards the couch. “Doesn’t sound like my kid. What happened?”

Buck drops back onto the couch, hands clasped in front of him, looking up at Eddie almost pleadingly. “I really tried, Eddie, I did. You said not to let him get away with anything, so I told him no when he asked to go out to lunch because you said there was stuff for sandwiches, and he wanted to go to the mall to ‘just look’ at a new chemistry kit that one of his friends has but he seemed upset when I said I’d let you know that he wanted it and maybe he could earn it somehow, then he asked for ice cream because he’d eaten the vegetables we made for lunch but you weren’t happy last time with all the sugar and you don’t normally let him eat ice cream after lunch, and—”

“Okay,” Eddie says, the pattern already emerging. “Maybe I should have been more clear this morning. Buck—when I told you to set down rules, I didn’t mean you couldn’t give in at all. I’m glad you didn’t let him get away with begging a chemistry set out of you, but little things like ice cream? That would have been okay.”

Buck groans and hangs his head. “I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m not good at being the responsible one, I’m good at being his best friend.”

“You’re pretty good at being the responsible one, too,” he says, knocking his knee against Buck’s. Buck looks doubtful, and Eddie takes in a breath. He doesn’t talk about his parents a lot, of his absence from most of Christopher’s life, but Buck looks miserable. “It takes a while,” he says. “When I got back from my tour—man, I didn’t know how to do anything, but I figured most of it out. You will, too. He’s just used to you teaming up with him to beg me for stuff, he’ll figure it out.”

Buck looks over at him, the same serious look he’d had when Bobby had told Eddie that Buck had cleared Christoper’s visit to the station back when Abuela broke her hip. “Thanks, Eddie,” he says quietly, and the weight of his tone makes Eddie’s heart skip a beat. 

“I’m just telling you the truth,” Eddie says. “You gonna stay while I talk to Chris? I thought we could go to the observatory tonight, they have this show about the northern lights and Chris has been asking questions about them since we watched Brother Bear.”

“I—” Buck hesitates for a second, and Eddie’s about to reassure him that Chris won’t hold a lasting grudge when he nods. “Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, has Chris ever had chicken and waffles? There’s a good place right near there, I can take you guys.”

He shakes his head; he’ll argue with him later, or just try to pay when Buck is distracted with Chris. Buck’s been circumventing Eddie’s insistence that they take turns paying for Friday night dinners by just bringing it over when he arrives lately, and while Eddie’s bank account appreciates the relief, he’s starting to feel uncomfortable with it. 

Chris is sitting at his desk when Eddie knocks and sticks his head in, math worksheet in front of him, and Eddie has the fleeting thought that if this is the end result of Buck babysitting, he’ll have to get him to do it more often. “Hey buddy,” he says, and Chris looks up briefly before turning his attention back to his work. “I heard things might not have gone so well with Buck today. Want to talk about it?”

“It was boring,” Chris mutters. “He didn’t let me do anything fun.”

Eddie hums and steps in, lets the door shut behind him before kneeling down. “I would have thought you’d have fun with Buck no matter what.”

“He just said no to _everything_ ,” Chris says, putting his pencil down and looking at Eddie. “He wouldn’t even take me to the park.”

He probably should have let Buck finish his narration of their day before cutting him off. “Chris,” he says, “I don’t know everything that happened, but what I do know is that you two are best friends, but Buck can’t _just_ be your best friend when he’s taking over for me, okay? He’s got to be more like your boring old dad, and I don’t want you getting mad at him for that. Besides,” he adds, tilting Chris’ chin to make eye-contact, “it’s okay to be disappointed that Buck doesn’t fall for your tricks, but it’s not very nice to be mad at him just because he doesn’t buy you what you want, is it?”

“I didn’t get mad at that,” Chris says. He pitches forward when Eddie puts a hand on his arm, resting his chin on Eddie’s shoulder. “I just got mad when we couldn’t go to the park.”

He has a feeling that Chris would have been perfectly happy to skip the park if he had been holding an ice cream cone—or chemistry kit—when he was told no, but he lets it go. “Well, we have to teach Buck how to be a good babysitter, okay? And that means listening to him and talking to us afterwards if you’re upset.”

“Okay,” Chris says. “Did he go home? I told him to go home.” Eddie pulls back and raises an eyebrow. “I’ll say sorry,” Chris says. “I promise.”

“He’s in the living room, we thought you might like to go to the observatory,” Eddie says. “So I’m glad you’re going to go apologize. You go talk to your best friend while I change and we’ll head out.”

“Uh, Dad?” Chris makes a face. “You should probably shower. You stink. You smell like a fish.”

They get home past Christopher’s bedtime; Eddie knew he was probably pushing it by letting him stay up so late after he had been rude to Buck—yet another decision to never let his parents find out about—but using the giant telescopes was more fun after dark, so he’d let it slide. 

His bedtime routine is rushed, but Chris still stops him and asks for a story, eyeing the copy of Charlotte’s Web he’d gotten from the library; when Eddie protests, Buck pulls a book out from the stack on Chris’ desk and suggests they read it together instead. “Your dad and I can take turns reading,” he offers, sitting on the floor and paging through the book, going from the end to the beginning, lips moving silently. “Here, Eddie, you can start.”

So they take turns reading while Eddie turns the pages, a seemingly random story, and by the time they’re on the last page he understands why Buck had him start when he pauses to look at the illustration of a little boy being tucked into bed and reads, “and here is a map with an x on the spot to find your way home to me.”

“I scrubbed for an hour to get that chocolate off my arm,” Buck says, shaking his head. “Can you imagine being covered in it?” He shudders and looks over his shoulder at Chris. “Did I tell you that your dad saved me? I could have _died_ —”

“He was nowhere near dying,” Eddie interrupts, glancing at Chris in the rearview mirror with a smile.

“—drowned in a huge vat of chocolate, I guess there are worse ways to go; do you think you like, appreciate the taste of chocolate as you’re—”

“This is getting off track,” Eddie says, and Chris giggles behind him.

“Right. As I was saying, your dad saved me buddy, I was about to slip in, chocolate would have been the last thing I ever—”

“I put my hand on his shoulder,” he says, meeting Chris’ eyes in the mirror and raising an eyebrow. “The _worst_ that would have happened was getting a little chocolate on his face.”

Chris giggles again. “You could have licked it off!”

“I might have sampled some off my arm,” Buck says, winking when Eddie makes a disgusted face. “I’m just teasing. I bought some at the gift shop on the way out.”

“Chim was wondering where you disappeared to,” Eddie says, flipping on his blinker to pull into the drop-off zone. “Didn’t share with the class?”

“I shared with Maddie,” Buck says, “and I might have slipped one into someone’s lunch box this morning so they would be surprised at school tomorrow.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Of course you did,” he says. “I’ll find parking close and meet you guys, just keep your phone on, Buck. Chris, don’t forget your backpack.”

“Right here,” Chris says, holding it up. “I have everything we need, Dad, don’t worry.”

“Yeah, don’t worry so much,” Buck says, grinning. “We know the plan, trust me.”

He should know the plan—they all have it memorized by now, painstakingly created over the last two weeks filled with pouring over travel guides from the library, Buck’s incessant internet searches, and Chris’ insistence that writing it down required a brand new notebook, which took Eddie three days to find because unless it had Mickey Mouse on it, it was deemed unacceptable for their long-awaited Disneyland trip. Eddie had—for once—been the one to do the research on the best time to go, and a couple of switched shifts, an excused absence from school, and an unwelcome 5:00am wake-up later, they were here. 

Chris is practically vibrating with excitement, tickets in hand, when Eddie walks up to them—he grabs him by the wrist and starts pulling, heading towards the gate to get in. “Come on, we have to go to town hall! We need buttons!”

Eddie had been pretty sure the mouse ears Buck had shown up with that morning was enough, but Chris was determined to get his “first visit” (“of a _lot_ ,” he had added after writing it in his notebook) button, and Eddie didn’t see any reason to stop him. He’d picked a low crowd day, they’d spent a week ranking the rides they wanted to go on to come up with Chris’ ultimate plan, but this was his son’s trip and he was really just along for the ride. 

By the time they hit lunch, Chris is already dragging, worn out by five hours of walking, waiting, and overwhelming excitement. “We gotta change the plan,” he says quietly to Buck as they stand in line for the Pirates of the Carribean ride for the third time in a row. “He’s not gonna make it much longer.”

“We can skip Haunted Mansion and just go to lunch next,” Buck says, leaning so far into his space that Eddie feels his breath on his ear. “He wanted to eat close to here, it’ll probably take at least an hour.”

“He’ll need longer than that,” Eddie says, putting his hand on top of Chris’ head and scratching his hair, feeling the way Chris leans heavily against him. “He won’t want us to carry him yet so if we’re going to stay until the fireworks, we need to figure something out.” He wraps an arm around Chris’ shoulders and hugs him close.

“The train,” they say in unison, and when Eddie looks over, Buck is grinning. 

“Maybe we can come again next week,” Chris says, and Eddie bites down on his tongue so he doesn’t laugh in disbelief. He’s _exhausted_ , which is ridiculous when he regularly works twenty-four shifts, but those generally have a lot of breaks that are not spent standing in line with his child on his back in the hot sun.

“Maybe we can come again next year,” he says. “You guys stay here while I go refill our water bottles.”

He’s really just looking for an excuse to get off the ground for a moment; Buck has Chris in his lap, and he’s not much younger than Eddie is, but he certainly doesn’t look like he’s as uncomfortable on the pavement as Eddie feels. Before he can walk away, though, Buck’s hand shoots up and wraps around his wrist, pulling a little until Eddie turns to face him. 

“I’m _starving_ ,” he says, and Eddie does not point out they just ate two pizzas between the three of them not two hours ago. “Could you take my card and get a churro for me? Please?” He sticks his lower lip into an exaggerated pout, like Eddie wouldn’t do whatever he asked anyway.

“No sharing with Chris, it’s too late,” he says, knowing full well that by the time the fireworks show is over, Chris will have sugar and cinnamon coated lips. He smiles back when Buck grins up at him, trying not to get caught up in this moment—his son on Buck’s lap, Buck looking up at him like he hung the moon just for agreeing to get him a snack—this whole day has been little moments of him falling deeper into Buck, fleeting glimpses of being a family that Eddie’s had to pull himself back from committing to memory and dwelling on. 

He brings the filled water bottles back and kisses Chris on the forehead before going to join the line for churros, giving in to the urge to look back at them only to see Buck looking over his shoulder for him for a moment before Chris’ face appears, grinning as he waves.

“How long have you been together?”

He startles and turns to look at the older woman next to him. “I’m sorry?”

She’s looking at Buck and Chris with a small smile on her face. “My husband still looks for me in a crowd,” she says, and he follows her gaze to see a man leaning against the side of a building, watching them. “Always wants to make sure he knows where I am. We’ve been married for 46 years, so you can take that as a good sign that yours does the same.”

His breath catches in his throat, ready to deny; Buck’s looking at him like Buck _always_ looks at him, but he’s obviously giving something away with his expression or his body language that broadcasts how he feels or he wouldn’t have a stranger commenting on it. He manages to stutter out a thank you, praying that she doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t ask him for details, doesn’t notice the way he can’t seem to breath all the sudden. If someone who doesn’t even know Eddie can see the way he feels for Buck, then what’s Buck seeing every time he looks at him? Does he pity him? Buck’s never even hinted that he knows the depth of Eddie’s feelings, has never done anything outside the realm of friendship, has never treated Eddie any differently than he treats Maddie, or Bobby, or any of their other friends. Buck loves him, he knows that, because Buck loves _all_ of them with his whole heart—there’s nothing special about Eddie.

The look on Buck’s face tells Eddie that he doesn’t, in fact, understand why Eddie’s canceling their standing Friday time together. “Just with going to Disney and all that,” he lies, because he can’t say _I need time to fall out of love with you and I can’t get that when I spend seventy hours a week with you, and it’s not like I can ignore you in the station_.

Buck nods, looking around like he’s distracted. “Uh, yeah, if that’s what Chris needs, that’s—sure. Um. What about Sunday? I can—”

“We have plans,” Eddie says. He doesn’t add that it’s just going to abuela’s, and that Buck has been invited along.

Buck looks almost relieved when the alarm rings, jogging off without a word. Eddie watches in confusion when he jumps into the other truck, and Hen shoots him a look. “Where’s your shadow? Going off to Neverland?”

Eddie shrugs. Buck may be upset, but another night of sitting close to him on the couch, a stranger's words ringing in his ears—he can’t do it. He can hardly sleep at night with all the guilt and worry eating through him, can’t stop himself from dissecting every conversation he can remember to look for clues, to figure out what he’s letting show; can’t stop himself from falling asleep to Buck’s videos because he’s too anxious to do anything else. Hen gives him a look that tells him she’s not fooled, and he ignores it.

They’re not far from the station when the radio cuts on with “118, 118, this is dispatch. We’ve got Bobby Nash on the line”, and Chim looks back at him in confusion, like Eddie knows anything about it. He doesn’t know what it’s about but he can’t bring himself to care, too busy hoping that Buck doesn’t find time to argue with him later, or to try to convince Eddie that they could just have a night in, instead. He knows himself—if Buck asks about it enough, he’ll give in.

He just needs time.

“Dispatch,” Chim is saying, “please repeat—”

The explosion is loud; Eddie ducks and covers the back of his neck automatically, forgetting that he’s in the truck, forgetting everything except to take cover—but nothing ever comes, and he doesn’t look back until he hears Hen’s horrified gasp.


	7. i knew i could

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, Lauren is amazing. I'm back at work now so updates may be coming slightly slower, and there's an updated chapter count because I decided I didn't have the heart to keep torturing poor Eddie for that much longer. Also [check out this cover that ronordmann made](https://ronordmann.tumblr.com/post/627128403886309376/the-deep-soothing-voice-rolls-out-of-the-speaker)!!

“Dispatch, this is Captain 118, what is the plan, we have people dying in the streets,” Chim says. The smell of smoke still lingers in the air, hot metal and asphalt, the eerie silence of their little bubble broken by Chim’s words. Eddie grounds himself with the weight of the med kit on his shoulder that he’d grabbed before realizing they were being kept out, kept away from Buck—

Buck, who’s dying in the street while someone with a bomb stands above him, because Eddie had pushed him away. Buck rode with them—with _him_ —always, stuck to Eddie’s side like he belonged there, until the one time it mattered. 

He almost doesn’t realize that Chim is stepping out in front of him, around the truck with his hands held up, and Eddie makes an aborted motion towards him. “Cap— _Cap_ ,” he hisses, because the last thing they need is for everything to get worse before he even has a chance to get to Buck. But Chim is moving past where Eddie could grab him, and he sucks in a breath through his nose and leans his head back against the truck for a moment. 

“Can you see how much of his leg is underneath the truck?” Hen says quietly, and he looks around the corner again, trying to narrow his focus past the red and blue flashing lights and into the darkness that surrounds Buck. 

“A little below the knee, I think,” he says, swallowing hard. It’s difficult to tell past his own rising nausea and Buck’s movements, the way he keeps trying to push himself up, the desperate look on his face. “Head injury,” he murmurs, turning back to face Hen. “Fuck, he needs to stop moving, if he—”

“Let’s just count it as a win that he _can_ for now,” she responds, and then she groans and Eddie whips around to see Bobby walking into the middle of the intersection. “I’m changing houses,” she says, shaking her head. “This one is cursed.”

Maybe he should have joined Station 6, he thinks. He would have never met Buck, but then Buck wouldn’t be laying in the middle of the street; he would have been riding in Eddie’s seat with Hen and Chim, safe and in one piece and likely having to be held back by Hen from running into the street to help someone else. Maybe it’s not the station that’s cursed, maybe it’s Eddie, maybe he should have pulled away sooner, should have gotten control over these feelings he has for Buck when they started instead of letting them grow, instead of holding on like it’s the only thing that will save him.

 _Crush injuries_ , he thinks, taking a deep breath. He has to clear his head—they _will_ get out there, and he can’t afford to hesitate because he’s wrapped up in guilt. They’ll need to get a neck brace on Buck, try to get a board underneath him so they don’t have to pull him out by the arms and risk additional injuries. He distracts himself from the confrontation between Bobby and the bomber with his list, eyes still on the scene, ready to duck behind the truck if another bomb goes off. His hand stays tight on the med bag, the other reaching into the pocket for his St. Christopher’s medal. _Bring him a miracle, too_ , he thinks, rubbing his thumb over the raised ridges of the icon, glove catching and pulling away from his hand. _Come on, Chris doesn’t deserve to lose another person he loves_.

Hen’s tense beside him, shifting her weight, ready to move as ATF moves in, and Eddie’s running before they even clear the area, a sudden flurry of activity as his colleagues are helped off the ground by paramedics from other stations. Buck’s looking up at them with heavy lidded eyes, blood smeared across his face as Eddie reaches for his neck, takes his pulse, looks for other injuries that need to be documented or taken care of. “Skin cold and pale,” he relays to Hen, and she nods. 

Chim and Bobby are discussing something above him, but he’s caught by Buck’s gaze, by Buck’s hand fluttering at his knee as he reaches for the stethoscope in his kit. He glances at Hen, busy running a line on Buck’s other side, before settling his hand over Buck’s and squeezing. “Hang in there, Buck,” he says quietly, keeping eye contact. There’s so much more he wants to say, words building up and dying on his tongue— _I’m sorry, you can have every Friday if you want them, every other day too, you’re never allowed in a different truck again_ —but all he can manage to do is shut that part of himself off, to look not at _Buck_ , but at the crush injury victim in front of him.

Eddie’s always been good at compartmentalizing.

“Lungs clear,” he says quietly to Hen, reaching for a neck brace and sliding it on while Hen supports Buck’s head. “We need to get a board underneath him to pull.” Around them, Bobby’s directing people to grab parts of the truck, and Eddie takes a deep breath. 

“Buckaroo,” she says, lifting Buck’s shoulders while Eddie slides a board as far under him as it can go, “this is going to hurt, but we’ll get you out.”

Buck’s screaming is nearly unbearable. Eddie grips his hand, forces himself to keep his eyes on Buck while Hen yells at them to lift higher. “Hang on, Buck,” he says again. Buck’s got tears running down his cheeks, mouth open and panting, and in that moment Eddie would have given everything to trade places with him. Buck’s head dips down, breaking his gaze, and Eddie curses under his breath. In a city that feels like it’s constantly under construction, he can’t believe there’s not a crane or _something_ that could help, that is closer and faster than whatever plan dispatch is coming up with. “Do we got anything on the truck we can use for leverage?” he asks, sitting back on his heels and looking up at Chim.

“We need more people,” Bobby says, and then, like the miracle Eddie has been praying for, they’re there, gathering around the truck, and all Eddie can do is plant himself next to Buck and keep him protected from the swell, still holding his hand.

The last thing he hears before the doors to the OR swing closed is Buck’s frantic, slurred voice, asking the doctor if he’ll still be able to work, hand closing around a nurses’ arm as they wheel him away, and then—

“Hen, you and Eddie stay here,” Chim says tiredly. “I need to get back to the station—”

“No, you should call Maddie and wait here for her,” Hen says. “I can drive—”

“You both stay,” he interrupts, still staring at the closed pale blue doors. “You’ve known him longer, and Chris is at home—” he breaks off, swallowing hard. It was an automatic excuse to get time to himself, time to break down and put himself back together, but it’s hitting him now that _Chris is at home_ and expecting Buck to be there the next day, and Eddie’s going to have to tell him Buck got hurt, and that it’s his fault that Buck was even riding with that crew in the first place, and—

“Sit down,” Hen says, and her hand closes around his elbow for just a moment before he pulls his arm away. 

“I’ll go,” he says. Regret and guilt burn at the back of his throat, but he just has to push them down for a little while longer. He’s gone years of his life not feeling things, he can manage it for another hour. 

“We’ll both go,” Hen says. “Chim, wait for Maddie, I’ll be back. He’ll be in there for hours.”

Hen lets him drive; he’s quiet, focuses more on the road than he needs to, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. He flips the switch to pre-empt the traffic lights despite not having a patient in the back but Hen doesn’t say anything, just stares out the window. When he looks over at her, she seems as shell-shocked as he feels. They arrive at the station but before Eddie has even turned off the lights, she reaches over and rests her hand on his arm. “He’ll be okay,” she says. 

He knows that. Buck wouldn’t agree, but he’s incredibly lucky that he avoided a head injury and only had to contend with surgery on his leg, but Eddie knows Buck. “He won’t be okay if he can’t work again,” he says. “Hen—”

“I know,” she says, letting out a sigh. “Look, Eddie, we’re all feeling this. I know you needed to leave because it was overwhelming and you keep a lot of these things to yourself, but no one’s going to judge you for a reaction. Just remember that.”

He nods once but doesn’t respond, just climbs out of the bus wordlessly, trying not to flinch at the way his footfalls echo off the lonely station walls. Upstairs, the news is blaring from the television, and he catches phrases at random about the bomber (“ _disgruntled at the Captain of the 118_ ”), Buck ( _“looked disoriented after being moved_ —”), and the people who had stepped in to help lift the truck as he grabs his bag out of his locker, turns around, and flees. 

It takes him five minutes of sitting alone in his truck to realize that the breakdown he anticipates, that he so desperately _wants_ , is not going to come. His hands shake on the wheel and his throat aches, but there’s nothing except a hollowness in his heart. The drive home passes is a blur; there’s just a single light on in the window when he pulls into to drive, and he realizes that he’s hours late and hadn’t even thought to update Carla. 

She’s not in the living room when he gets in, but as soon as he drops his keys and bag she’s there, reaching out for him. “Eddie,” she says, and her voice shakes, “how is he? What do you know?”

“In surgery,” he says. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you I’d be late—”

She waves her free hand, the other clutching his. “Don’t you worry about that. I turned on the news when I didn’t hear from you after an hour—don’t worry, Christopher was already asleep—do you think—?” 

“He was stable on the way to the hospital,” he says, and allows himself to be pulled into the kitchen and pushed down into a chair at the table, but shakes his head when she starts getting a mug out. “Look, I don’t—you can say no but—could you go there in the morning? And check on him for me? I would but I have a shift, and we’re already going to be down a few people—”

“Of course I will,” she says. “I’ll be down there first thing and I’ll text you an update.”

He sits at the table after she leaves, numb, until the clock on the microwave ticks over to a new day and he finally manages to get up, strip off his clothes, and fall into bed. He doesn’t even bother to wait it out this time, just opens the YouTube app on his phone, blindly taps one of Buck’s videos, and when his bright, cheerful voice rolls out through the night, finally buries his head in his pillow and cries. 

“But I don’t want to go to school, I want to see Buck,” Chris says stubbornly, and Eddie can’t believe he was stupid enough to tell Chris that Buck had been in an accident _before_ he took him to school. He should have known this would happen. 

“I want to see Buck, too,” he tries, “but he wasn’t the only firefighter that got hurt last night so I really have to go to work. I promise I’ll call Buck and if he’s up for it, I’ll take you to see him tonight. But right now, you’ve got to go to school.”

“Abuela can take me,” Chris says, looking at him hopefully. “ _She_ doesn’t have to work. I promise I’ll do all my homework, Dad, please. Buck might be sad in the hospital. I was always sad.”

Oh, fuck. His heart drops like a lead weight at Chris’ words, and if he had known what condition Buck was in he might have given up and pulled his son out of school for the day. He can only hope that seeing Buck tonight soothes him, because having a day off tomorrow is already looking like a definite possibility. “Buddy,” he says, “I swear to you that we will go see Buck the _second_ I get done with work if he’s awake. But you know he would want you to go to school.”

Chris finally relents, but he looks doubtful. “Fine,” he says, “but I’m going to find a really good book for him in the library at recess.”

True to his word, Chris is sitting on the front steps with his backpack on and clutching two books in his hands when Eddie pulls up after his shift, and he’s well on his way to the truck before Eddie cuts the engine. “Buck’s waiting for us,” he says, and Eddie holds the request to give him some time to shower and change on his tongue. “Me and Carla called him and he’s really excited to see us.”

Eddie tries not to frown; he’d tried to get ahold of Buck several times that day, but all his texts had gone ignored. Buck might not want to see _him_ , he thinks—Eddie’s the reason he was on that truck and both he and Buck know it. He bites the inside of his cheek to distract himself from the thought and pulls in a breath; all he can do is take Chris there, and if Buck doesn’t want to see him, he’ll wait out in the hallway. 

Chris doesn’t seem to notice Eddie’s panic or the rigid way he holds himself as they walk through the hallway, just continues chattering about his day like he had on the drive over and accepts Eddie making noises of affirmation through his stories. Eddie stops as they turn the corner to Buck’s hallway and crouches down, putting his hands on Christopher’s shoulders. “Did Buck tell you what happened?” he asks, searching his son’s face. 

“He said the truck fell over on him,” Chris says, nodding. “But that everyone saved him and only his leg was hurt. He’ll have crutches! I told him I would teach him how to use them but he said he knew because he broke his ankle when he was a kid.”

“You’re a good kid,” Eddie says, ruffling his hair. “We’re only going to visit for a little bit tonight, okay? Buck needs rest, so when I say it’s time to go I need you to listen. You hear me?”

Chris sighs. “I hear you,” he grumbles. “But I promised to read him this book, Dad, so you need to let me.”

Eddie’s heart is pounding in his throat when they approach Buck’s door; he’s ready to pull back, to leave, anything Buck needs when he sees the downcast look on his face, but when Buck catches sight of them in the doorway, he breaks into a smile. “Diaz boys!” he exclaims, and Eddie’s surprised that it sounds genuine. “I didn’t think you’d be here for another hour, you must have come straight from work,” he says, looking up at Eddie. 

“I was ready when Dad got home,” Chris says. He walks right over to Buck and tries to hug him, arm barely stretching across Buck’s stomach. 

“Help us out here, Eddie,” Buck says, and Eddie lifts Chris onto the bed, settling him by Buck’s hip. Buck pulls him down to his chest, wrapping his long arms around Chris’ waist, and sighs when Chris winds his arms around Buck’s neck and laughs. 

“Your hair is tickling me,” he says, and shrieks when Buck shakes his head back and forth across Christopher’s neck. 

Eddie hovers by the bed, ready to pull Chris back, but Buck doesn’t let go, doesn’t seem like he needs intervention. He looks—peaceful, and Eddie finally lets go of the breath he’s been holding and pulls the chair close to Buck’s beside before sinking down into it. 

“I forgot to ask Dad to get the burgers,” Chris says when he pulls back. “Oops.”

Buck smiles and helps him get settled in his lap. “It’s okay, they’ve got some food here. We can call and order it.”

Eddie leans back in the chair and watches them interact, thinks about Carla telling him how worried and withdrawn Buck had been when she’d seen him compared to what he sees now, and his chest aches at the ability Christoper has to brighten Buck’s day. He’s still not sure how welcome he is until Buck looks past Christoper at him and smiles, small and uncertain, and Eddie doesn’t know what makes him reach out but he grasps Buck’s hand in his and squeezes.

Buck doesn’t pull his hand away.

Finally, after Chris has exhausted his stories about school, they’ve eaten dinner, and the books Chris brought had been read, Eddie taps Chris on the thigh and tells him to stay goodnight, raising an eyebrow when he opens his mouth to protest. “Fine,” he says, leaning back in to hug Buck again before gripping the edge of the bed and sliding off carefully. “But I have something for you,” he says, making a grabbing hand motion towards his backpack until Eddie hands it over. He pulls out his tablet and sets it on Buck’s lap. “Now you can text everyone and watch movies,” he says. “The password is c-r—”

Eddie clears his throat, forcing himself not to smile. “Well, that clears a few things up,” he says, and Buck laughs. “You don’t have your phone?”

“It was in the truck,” Buck says. “Maddie’s going to buy me a new one in the morning. I never backed my old one up though so I’m pretty sure I lost everything.”

“Dad saved all our pictures,” Chris says, and Eddie feels his cheeks flush when Buck looks up at him and smiles. “He can send them all to you again.”

All the guilt and worry Eddie’s been feeling had successfully pushed everything else to the back of his mind, which is why he’s awake at 2am, trying to talk himself off a parent-induced ledge. 

He’d completely forgotten that his family was arriving tomorrow, until Chris had smiled at Buck over FaceTime and said “do you want to come over for dinner tomorrow? You can meet my cousins,” and Eddie had very nearly made a choked, panicked noise. He’d seen his mom’s name pop up on his phone, but he’d neglected to pick up, wanting to give himself a breather before having to get into whatever it was that she was calling him about.

Suddenly, Cap asking him what kind of cake he liked out of the blue made a lot more sense. He’d been looking forward to his shield ceremony for a few weeks—not because the 118 really treated him like a probie, but because the end of his probationary period came with a much-needed pay raise. Thanks to Carla’s knowledge of the system he’s been able to get a lot of Chris’ needs covered, but it would be nice to finally be able to add to his savings and not have to worry about his budget so much.

He’s scrolling through his lists of free activities in Los Angeles, looking for somewhere he can suggest taking all the kids, when his screen goes dark and Buck’s name pops up, making his heart pound, anxiety immediately rising. “Hey,” he says, tapping the speaker button. “You okay? Is it your leg? I can wake up Chris—”

“I can’t sleep,” Buck says in a rush. “What do you do when you can’t sleep? God—I’m sorry, Eddie, you _were_ sleeping, I’ll just—”

“I wasn’t,” he says, settling back onto his pillows. “Don’t worry. Are you okay?”

There’s a long silence before Buck sighs. “We don’t have to talk about it. What are you still doing up?”

Eddie frowns, swiping back to the open browser and continuing to scroll. “We can talk about whatever you need, Buck. I’m just looking for stuff to do while my sisters and their kids are in town. What’s going on?”

“Ali and I—we broke up,” Buck says quietly. “Uh, right after I got home she asked what I was going to do next—does anyone think I’ll be back, Eddie? Do you?”

“Of course you will,” he says. It’s probably not the right thing to say; Buck’s still got a long recovery ahead of him and even the doctor wasn’t sure if he’d have the same abilities, but he knows Buck, and if Buck wants to make it back, Eddie is pretty sure he’ll die trying. “You better, Jamison is a lot more obnoxious than you are and if you ditch me with him, I’ll kill you.”

Buck laughs; the sound soothes the ache in Eddie’s chest. “At least I have you.”

“You always have me,” he says. “So—Ali didn’t think you’d recover?”

“She wasn’t sure she could handle me going back, and we got into an argument after I agreed to another surgery at my appointment today—but the doctor said my chances of working would be much higher, Eddie, I can’t just—”

“Of course you can’t,” he says. There’s no reason to argue with Buck, even if Eddie would rather have him wait. Buck will always choose the option he thinks will get him back to work, and Eddie knows that. The only thing he can do is support him. “I get it.”

“I knew you would,” Buck says. “Thanks, Eddie.”

“You should stay over here,” Eddie says. “I know you want to be at home, but—you’ll need help after another surgery, and Carla’s here part of the time, you know she’d want to help you out. That couch of yours has got to be getting uncomfortable anyway.”

“I can tell you from experience that yours isn’t any better,” Buck says. “And don’t say I can take your room, I know you’re about to.”

“Buck, it’s the least I can do,” he says without thinking, and cringes when Buck stays silent. “You could—”

“What do you mean by that?” Buck interrupts. “You’ve been saying stuff like that—why do you think you need to do anything at all?”

“You’re my friend,” he says, and Buck’s already protesting before he finishes the sentence. He’s not really sure why he folds so easily, why he gives in and tells Buck what he’s been thinking since he heard the explosion, but he’s tired of feeling guilty and maybe if Buck understands, he’ll let Eddie start making it up to him. “Buck, you wouldn’t have even been in that truck if—”

“Eddie.” Buck’s tone is serious, harsh. “Do you really think—”

“You know it’s the truth,” he says; he feels like he’s choking on the words. “You always ride with us—”

“You have to let it go,” Buck says gently. “Eddie, I don’t blame you. It’s not anyone’s fault except for Freddie, and I’ve been trying to let that go, too. I’ve been reading a lot about how anger prevents physical healing and—well, that doesn’t matter. Of course I don’t blame you, Eddie.”

The weight pressing on his chest is worse, somehow, with Buck’s words. He _wants_ Buck to blame him, to yell and get angry, to understand that he wouldn’t be in this situation if Eddie had been able to control his feelings in the first place. “I still think you should stay with us,” he says, redirecting the conversation to safer ground. “You could stay in Chris’ room, he’d be thrilled to sleep in here with me for a few weeks. We shared a room when we lived with abuela and he loved it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Buck says after a moment, and Eddie knows that he’s not giving the conversation up, just setting it aside for later. “I should let you go.”

“I listen to your videos,” Eddie says, finally answering the question Buck had first asked. “When I can’t sleep. Uh—that’s weird, I know, but they’re—comforting.”

“That’s—”

“I’m sorry—”

“That means a lot to me, Eddie,” Buck says, and he sounds as choked up as Eddie feels. “I’m glad I can—be there, even if I can’t. But I don’t really like listening to myself—”

“I can read to you,” Eddie says. He doesn’t give himself time to overthink it, just offers as soon as the thought pops into his head.

“Please,” Buck says, before Eddie has a chance to offer anything else. “Yes, I—yes. You’re—you’re comforting, too.”

Everything seems to freeze as he reaches for the James Patterson book on his nightstand—time around him, his heart, his breathing. He’s desperate to ask Buck if he means it like Eddie means it, if he walks around with Eddie’s voice in his head, with phantom hands on his shoulders and arms pushing him in the right direction, if he’s felt Eddie’s hand holding his since he left the hospital. He wants to _know_ , opens his mouth to ask, but—“Good,” is the only thing that comes out, scratchy and rough. He can’t ask; he’ll never ask, he knows that. “I hope you like political thrillers.”

“I’ll like anything,” Buck says, and Eddie flips the cover open and starts to read. 

“Do you think Buck will want my books?” Chris asks from his spot on the floor, carefully placing his favorite Legos into a box. Despite Eddie telling him repeatedly that Buck was just going to stay with them until his cast was off and Chris would still be able to use his bedroom at all times except for sleeping, his kid had insisted on moving some of his things to Eddie’s room. “You know, so he can read them on YouTube.”

“I think he probably has books picked out and doesn’t need you telling him what to do all the time,” Eddie teases. “Buddy, you don’t have to move anything, I’ll move your dresser into my room—”

“And my alarm clock,” Chris says. “Or should I keep it for Buck?”

“That’s up to you,” Eddie says. “But Chris—you need to remember that Buck’s here so we can help him, okay? Not so he can play with you all the time. Remember what we talked about—he can’t be just your best friend when he’s staying with us. And we both know Buck has some trouble saying no to you, so I need you to try your best to look out for him, too, otherwise he’ll have to go back home.”

“Fine,” Chris sighs.

“Finish this up and then it’s bedtime,” Eddie says, pushing himself off the ground. “Tomorrow we’ll get your best friend all settled in.”

“You’re wrong, Dad,” Chris says later when he’s tucking him in. “Buck reads the books for me. He said he would read the one I brought to the hospital, he _promised_. I picked it out just for him.”

“We can look and see,” Eddie says, sitting on the edge of the bed. He’d gotten a few emails about new videos over the past week, but with Buck calling him every night just after 1:00am, he hasn’t gotten around to watching them. “Which book was it?”

“It’s like the Thomas one,” Chris says, yawning. “ _I Knew You Could_. About the train.”

It’s the video at the top; Eddie bumps Chris over and squeezes in with him, kissing his temple when Chris giggles and moves over. “Hey there, Buckaroos,” Buck says, and Eddie’s relieved to see that he doesn’t look as pale as he has been. “Some of you know that I’m a firefighter, and a few weeks ago I had an accident at work and I broke my leg. My best friend knew I was feeling sad, so he brought me this book to cheer me up and remind me that even when we’re feeling bad, we need to try our best. Everyone tucked in? Teeth brushed? Let’s get started.”

“Chris,” Eddie says, “that’s why you picked the book out?” Jesus, he thinks he might actually cry. “You’re a really amazing kid, you know that?”

“I know,” Chris says, grinning. “Hush, Dad, you’re talking over the video.”

“You can watch it again,” Eddie says. “I love you, buddy.”

“I love you too,” Chris says. “Now can you _please_ be quiet? This is the best part.”

“ _You’ll go through tunnels, surrounded by dark, and you’ll wish for a light or even a spark. You might be scared or a little bit sad, wondering if maybe your track has gone bad. So here’s some advice to help ease your doubt: the track you took in must also go out. So steady yourself and just keep on going—before you know it, some light will be showing. And then you’ll be out, heading to a new place; you’ll be ready for the next tunnel you face._ ”


	8. can you read to me?

The driveway is covered in a wash of color when Eddie pulls in, rivers of blue and pink creating waves and curves; Chris is soaked as he lays on the grass, Buck sitting against the house, shirtless, with the hose in his hand, an arch of water rising up to rain over the driveway and front yard. He grabs his bag from the passenger seat and throws it over his shoulder, grinning at Chris as he bends down and tickles his sides. “Hey, kiddo, whatcha guys doing?”

“We drew with chalk and then we were going to go inside but Buck can’t get up,” Chris says, eyes closed against the sun but arms reaching out for Eddie. “So I got him the hose so we could cool down.”

 _We_ , Chris says, but Buck is perfectly dry save for the sweat beading on his temples, legs stuck straight out in front of him. He’s at least in the shade, but the slight flush over his skin tells Eddie that he hasn’t always been, so Eddie helps Chris up and pats his back. “Go change so we can get dinner started,” he says. “You need help?”

“Nope,” Chris says, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes before turning towards the house.

Buck’s watching Chris go with a soft look on his face when Eddie walks over to him, and he grins up at him, ruefully, when Eddie’s shadow falls over his face. “Hey, Eds.”

“Got yourself into a bit of a jam, huh?”

“Little bit,” Buck says, nodding. “Figured I could slide down the wall to sit with Chris and draw but I couldn’t manage to get back up.”

Eddie shakes his head and tosses his bag over near the front door. “Not sure what I’m gonna do with you,” he says, squatting down in front of Buck. He reaches out and grabs both of Buck’s hands and pulls him up, dropping one to his waist when Buck sways, unsteady on his feet, leaving it there against his warm skin. For a second he just stands there, soaking in the feel of Buck’s hand in his, the absence of space between them, allows himself to breathe in the quiet intimacy of the moment.

“Uh, Eddie?” He forces himself to move back casually, to not act like anything is out of the ordinary, but Buck is just looking down at him sheepishly. “I forgot my crutches over there,” Buck says, nodding to the far end of the driveway.

It’s an unbearable fondness he feels for Buck, sometimes, and he’s going to have to learn how to handle it better if Buck is really going to be staying with them for the next six weeks. Despite agreeing initially, Buck had seemed surprised when Eddie had shown up at his house an hour after dropping his parents off at the airport, and had given a few half-hearted protests from the bottom of the staircase as Eddie shoved clothes from Buck’s drawers into a suitcase, and had kept them up as Eddie pushed him out the door and into the car until he’d finally threatened to duct tape over Buck’s mouth. 

He could shuffle Buck a foot back towards the house, have him lean against the side again while he grabbed the crutches, stand behind him while he navigates the stairs. Or—he slides his arm around Buck’s waist and nudges him towards the front door. “I’ll grab them in a minute,” he says. “Let’s get you inside. I think you’re going to need some aloe, you’re getting a burn.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think it all the way through,” Buck says, and he drops an arm around Eddie’s shoulders as they work their way into the house. “But I have a surprise for you.”

“What, you’re finally going to agree to take my room?” He’s been arguing with Buck about it for three days—he can only fit on Chris’ bed if he props his legs up on pillows at the end and sleeps with his head nearly touching the headboard, and Eddie wonders if it’s actually any better than the couch. 

“Nah, I’m good,” Buck says. “Carla picked up a slow cooker—well, two—so you don’t have to worry about cooking every night. Chris and I can handle it.”

“I told you I didn’t mind,” Eddie says. “You want a shower before dinner? Cool water might feel good.”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Buck says. “I know you don’t mind, but Chris has been helping me look up recipes and he’s excited about it, so just let us have this one. We threw together some pulled pork and Chris wanted it on a baked potato—weird kid, I don’t know about how you’re raising him, Eds—”

He laughs, moving out of the way while Buck hops into the bathroom and closing the door behind them. “My parents do that,” he says. “You’re gonna love it, Buck, I promise. Can I help?”

“Yeah, sure. Anyway,” Buck says, and he continues talking as Eddie kneels down and helps him ease his shorts over his cast. Not in any of Eddie’s inappropriate daydreams had he even thought that this is how he would be on his knees in front of a naked Buck, but after two days of listening to Buck fall into the door and curse loudly he’d realized that a request for assistance was not going to be coming, so he’d simply knocked on the door and told Buck to let him help.

There had been fewer protests from Buck than Eddie had expected.

He stands back up and leans into the shower stall, turning on the water and letting it warm up while Buck keeps talking about all the meals he and Chris have planned. “Sounds good,” he says when Buck finally takes a breath. “But don’t feel like you need to, Buck, you’re supposed to be resting before your surgery, not chasing after Chris all day, cleaning everything you can reach—”

“The window was dirty!” Buck says, and Eddie rolls his eyes and helps guide him into the shower chair, wedges the step stool under his foot so he can avoid getting the cast wet. “It’s not my fault you never clean—”

“The windows don’t need to be cleaned every time they get a smudge, but the point is that your doctor said to rest. Wash up—that’s not too hot, is it?—I’m going to make sure Chris is all set and then I’ll be back.”

“I promised Buck I’d read to him tonight,” Chris protests, and Eddie raises an eyebrow. “I _did_. He said he wanted me to.”

“He shouldn’t have,” Eddie says, blocking his bedroom doorway and reaching out to turn Chris around. “He had surgery, buddy, he needs a lot of rest and we need to make sure he gets that. I know you want to help him, but right now help looks like leaving him alone.”

Chris sighs. “You used to read to me,” he says, turning and walking into his own room. “It would make him feel better, Dad.”

“I’m not arguing,” Eddie says. “Why don’t you read it to me for now—a practice run so it’s perfect when your patient wakes up.”

That’s thankfully enough to get Chris in bed, and Eddie curls up next to him and tries not to dwell on just how uncomfortable Buck must have been the last four nights. He’d been too out of it when they’d gotten back home from the hospital to argue when Eddie had put him in his own bed and he’s pretty sure he could get Buck to agree to staying in there a few more nights, but he’s going to have to come up with something else after that, or just get Chris a longer mattress.

He wanders around the house after Chris falls asleep, cleaning up after the mess that’s accumulated over the last few days, writing out a shopping list, and limiting the amount of times he checks to see if Buck’s woken up. He has an alarm set for his next dose of medication but it’s over an hour away, so he eventually settles onto the couch and turns on the television, breathes in and out deeply for a moment while his body tries to let go of the weight of the worry he’s been carrying around. He must zone out for longer than he realizes because the alarm on his phone causes him to startle and jolt halfway off the couch before he realized what was happening.

At first, he doesn’t realize anything is wrong; he bumps the door open with his hip, hands full of water, medication, and a plate of leftovers, attempts to set it all down on the nightstand without dropping anything. “Buck,” he says, “time for some—hey,” he says, letting the medication fall, “you should have called for me—”

Buck’s shaking on the bed, tension in his jaw. “Tried,” he says.

Eddie helps him sit up, feels the familiar settling of guilt over him as he helps Buck rest against the pillows. He shakes the pills into his hand and hands them over, helping Buck steady the glass of water he holds to his lips as he swallows them down. “That’ll take a little while to kick in,” he says. “What can I do?”

—which is how he ends up with Buck’s head in his lap half an hour later, desperately trying to keep his hands to himself as Buck smashes his cheek into Eddie’s thigh. “You should try to sleep,” he says. 

“Wanna watch somethin’,” Buck says. “TV?”

“We’re staying in bed,” Eddie says, and tries not to think about the reason Buck snorts with laughter a moment later. “You need to rest.”

“I‘ve been sleepin’,” Buck mumbles. “You’re soft, Eddie.”

“Hey now,” he says, poking Buck in the shoulder and letting his hand linger, palm against his shirt and resisting the urge to slide his fingers down until they find warm skin. “All those hours we put into working out and you’re saying I’m still soft?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, sighing. “It’s _nice_. Sometimes I wish I was Chris.”

He feels the burn of unvoiced words in his throat, an entreaty for clarification, a desperate inquiry. He settles on, “it’d be pretty nice. He’s a happy kid.”

“Cause he has you,” Buck says. He rolls his head, looking up at Eddie with flushed cheeks and heavy eyelids. “Will you stay? You make me feel better.”

It’s because of the hydrocodone, Eddie knows that. Buck’s always seeking out touch, seeking out company—the drugs might be making him a little looser, but there’s nothing about Buck’s request that’s specific to Eddie—he’s absolutely certain that if Buck had stayed with Hen, he’d be saying the same things to her. 

That doesn’t mean he can’t pretend, though, for one night—it can’t cause that much harm, he’s already painfully in love with Buck, so what’s one indulgence when Buck is offering it to him? When Buck is asking it of him?

So he twists to get the tablet off the nightstand and opens up Netflix, taps on the first movie in the to-watch list and holds it out, allowing Buck to grab it before he rests his hand on the top of Buck’s head and digs his fingers into Buck’s soft, wavy hair. Buck falls asleep after a few minutes, but Eddie stays there through another movie, completely unwilling to let go. 

“I can take him on Tuesday,” Maddie says, and Eddie scribbles her name next to the date on the appointment sheet the physical therapist had given them. “Every Tuesday, I don’t work—and Chim can do Thursdays—”

“Those aren’t a problem,” Eddie says. “He’s supposed to get his cast off in a few hours and I can’t get him to that, though, Chris has an appointment a little earlier, can you cover it?”

“No, but I can talk to Chim—”

“No need,” Buck says, crutches clacking against the floor before he lets them fall and drops on the couch next to Eddie. “I’ll just go with you to Chris’, no big deal. Promise the kid some ice cream afterwards and I’m sure he’ll be willing to sit through mine.”

“It’s not him I’m worried about, it’s you,” Eddie says, raising an eyebrow. “You’re antsy in a doctor’s office, but if you promise to be good—” he’s cut off as Buck digs an elbow into his side, laughing.

“Bye, Maddie,” he says, and grabs Eddie’s phone and hangs up. “You done being a boring dad yet? Wanna play video games?”

“God forbid _someone_ figures out a way to get you to all these appointments,” Eddie says, gesturing to the paper on the table. “And no, I’m not done. You need to eat something, you skipped breakfast.”

Buck shrugs. “Not hungry.”

He sighs. As they’ve gotten closer to Buck getting his cast off, he’s been more anxious—a little more clingy with Chris during the day, picking at his food instead of eating. “Buck.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, turning towards him with an exaggerated frown before relaxing and nearly dropping onto Eddie’s lap. 

And then there’s this—Buck’s complete lack of space between them. He seems to have taken waking up next to Eddie in bed—not what Eddie had intended to happen the night after Buck’s surgery—as permission to be as touchy as he wants. A month ago, Eddie would have said Buck surely wasn’t holding back with how physical he could be with his friends, and now he knows that he was ridiculously, completely wrong. Because where Buck would have patted Eddie on the back, he now throws an arm around him and holds it there, curling up his fingers and letting his knuckles rub against Eddie’s shoulder. Buck grabs at him instead of brushing their arms together, lets his body lean against Eddie’s if they’re standing for too long, falls against him on the couch and stays there, breathing out what Eddie would swear was a happy, content sigh when Eddie’s traitorous fingers move of their own accord into his hair. 

He’d wondered, at first, if maybe Buck did have some sort of feelings for him that couldn’t be explained away as friendship, except for the fact that at night, Buck slides against the outside edge of the bed and holds himself more still than Eddie’s ever seen him. Buck had only agreed to sleep in Eddie’s room if Eddie didn’t leave, which he hadn’t—until his third sleepless night, jerking himself awake every time he felt himself relax and start to take up more room. Buck was so clearly uncomfortable with sharing a bed that Eddie had taken to waiting until he was asleep to relocate to the couch for the remainder of the night, where he spent his time trying to figure out what the hell was going on before giving up completely. He doesn’t need to understand Buck’s reasoning to respect it, but he’s almost glad that Buck’s not as touch-seeking in his sleep—he clearly needed the reminder that Buck wasn’t his, that they didn’t have the type of relationship he wishes they did.

“You need to eat,” he says, and shamelessly uses his son to get Buck to agree to a sandwich, which turns into his own sandwich and the half Christopher doesn’t finish, a banana, and the rest of the Doritos that Eddie had tried to hide from him but clearly not well enough. Chris chatters through all of it, telling Buck about the surgeries he’s had when Buck asks why he has a check-up, reeling off a list of presents he’d gotten from his grandparents after the last one, and whispering something into Buck’s ear that had made them both laugh near hysterically every time they looked at Eddie.

He would have been more offended if he hadn’t been so relieved to see Buck happy. So he’d pretended to be irritated, which had made them laugh harder, and by the time Eddie had cleaned up after lunch and was trying to shuffle them both off to the truck, Buck’s cheeks are flushed and Chris has a permanent smile on his face.

He doesn’t think much about the silence when he gets home; it’s been a long shift and all he wants to do is crash for a few hours until he has to go pick Chris up from school, and it’s not until he’s standing in front of the open refrigerator and eating anything that can be shoved in his mouth directly that he even realizes the back door is open. He frowns—Buck’s been napping directly after his PT sessions lately, pushing himself too hard in an attempt to make up for lost time, so he’s not sure what he expects to see when he looks out into the back yard, but Buck laying facedown on the grass isn’t it.

Shoving the container of egg salad back onto the shelf, he lets the door swing closed and tosses the spoon into the sink on his way outside, kneeling beside Buck to roll him onto his side, heart sinking when he takes in the blood on his knees and scraped up hands. 

“Save the lecture,” Buck says, squinting up at Eddie.

“You’re not supposed to be exercising on therapy days,” he says anyway, getting his hands under Buck’s shoulders and pulling him up. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Buck groans. “I can get it, Eddie, I don’t need help.”

He raises an eyebrow, looking down at the way Buck’s leg spasms, at the blood trickling down from the cut on his knee. “Sure you don’t,” he says. “Stand up, then.”

Buck moves his feet and hesitates. “I will in a minute.”

“Can’t put any weight on it?”

“Just fuck off,” Buck says. Eddie doesn’t care about the words—isn’t the first time Buck has said it during his recovery and he’s pretty sure it won’t be the last—but his tone is hollow, there’s no desperation or bite to his words, and that worries him. “The cast is off, I can manage myself now. You don’t have to keep feeling like you owe me anything.”

“That’s not what this is about,” he says. He’d felt guilty, yes—still feels it, frankly, when he watches Buck struggle through his physical therapy sessions, jaw clenched tight and swallowing noises of pain— but he’s not helping out of guilt. He reaches out and puts his hands on Buck’s shoulders, waits until Buck nods to slip his hands under Buck’s arms and lifts him. He moves his arm around Buck’s waist and waits until the now-familiar weight of Buck’s arm is around his shoulders to take a small step forward. “You know,” he says, “when I did physical therapy for my shoulder after I got shot—”

“When—oh,” Buck says, and Eddie feels Buck lean against him more as the tension in his body lessens. “Eddie, you don’t have to talk about this.”

“I know,” he says, still taking small steps across the yard. “I didn’t say anything to Shannon, you know, but all I wanted was some _help_. She wasn’t in the right place for it, she had Chris to deal with and I wasn’t a lot of help, but—it would have been nice. To—you know, know someone cared.”

Buck’s quiet as Eddie moves him into the house and helps him sit down in a kitchen chair, doesn’t say a word as Eddie grabs the first aid kit and pulls one of Buck’s hands towards him, cradling it carefully in his own as he cleans the dirt out before moving onto his knees.

“I’m not going to bandage these yet,” he says. “Let’s get you in the shower first, you need some heat for your leg, and you’ll feel better when you’re clean.”

“I can’t,” Buck says quietly. “I can hardly move, Eds, just bandage it up—”

“I can help,” he says, and at Buck’s disbelieving look, he grins. “I’ve got a kid, Buck, you’re not the first person I’ve bathed and you probably won’t be the last. I promise that when it’s my turn to get a truck dropped on top of me, I’ll let you help as much as you want.”

The corner of Buck’s mouth twitches up, finally, and he narrows his eyes. “Stop trying to steal all my glory,” Buck says. “At least make it an ambulance.”

Eddie nods, pulling Buck up by the elbows. “Good idea,” he says. “Won’t need the whole city to lift it off me, you could probably manage that on your own.”

He gets Buck settled into the shower, water turned as hot as he thinks Buck can handle while he goes back to the kitchen for a bottle of water and pulls out clothes for Buck to change into. Buck’s face is twisted up in pain when he gets back to the bathroom, and he hesitates a moment before going back to the bedroom to get the bottle of pain medication they keep out of reach. “I think you should take one,” he says when he returns, and Buck only hesitates a moment before nodding.

And then there’s nothing left to do but strip to his boxers and squeeze into the small shower stall behind Buck to help, to lather shampoo into his hands and work them into Buck’s hair, dig his fingers into tired and overworked muscles and carefully slide a washcloth over every inch of Buck’s skin. As much as he tries to keep it clinical, ties to keep himself distanced, he’s incredibly aware of the intimacy of the moment, of the way Buck’s breathing steadies as Eddie massages his leg, how his chin drops towards his chest and his exhale of relief when the pain killers start to kick in. 

It’s not until Buck looks up at him, gaze slightly unfocused, that Eddie turns the water off and helps him dry off, leads him into the bedroom and gets him dressed and into bed. He sends a quick text to Hen, asking if she’d be able to pick up Chris and keep him until after dinner, sets his alarm just in case she can’t, and crawls into bed on the other side. Buck doesn’t keep his distance this time; he lays flat on his back, arm pushed up against Eddie’s, tapping his foot against Eddie’s ankle, and the gentle rhythm has almost lured Eddie to sleep when Buck rolls onto his side and says quietly, “you won’t always care.”

It feels like it takes effort to open his eyes, energy he doesn’t have to pull back and look at Buck. “What makes you say that?”

“When I can’t come back,” Buck says. His voice dips and breaks, and Eddie reaches out without thinking too much about it and wipes away a tear that slides down Buck’s nose. “You an’ Hen an’ Chim, it’ll be too much, you won’t have time for me.”

“Buck,” he says, “I spent all my time with you outside of work before you got hurt, that’s not going to change.”

“Gotta pinky promise,” Buck mumbles, and Eddie shakes his head but holds his pinky out for Buck to hook his own around. “Can you read to me?”

He’d rather not; his eyes are gritty with sleep, but he pushes himself up far enough to grab the book sitting on his nightstand and flips it open, rolls on his side facing Buck so he can prop one side of the book against the mattress, and starts reading. He reads one page, then another, watching to see when Buck’s face slackens in sleep; at the end of the chapter he tosses the book aside and reaches out to squeeze Buck’s shoulder. “Get some rest,” he says, and Buck sighs and moves closer to him. 

“‘kay,” Buck says, but he opens his eyes and smiles softly, and Eddie’s breath catches as Buck moves a hand up to his cheek and leans in to kiss him. And for one moment—just one, long enough to memorize the pressure of Buck’s mouth against his and the softness of his lips—Eddie kisses him back.


	9. if you ever want to bring a piano to the beach, don't

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little shorter than normal but kids start school this week and I will likely be crying daily so let's just have some fluff before all that.

Eddie can’t move. 

Buck’s breath puffs out in his sleep, every soft exhale a whisper of the kiss he’d pressed onto Eddie’s lips before his warm palm had turned to fingertips dragging down Eddie’s cheeks as his eyes fluttered closed.

Buck had kissed him. 

Buck had _kissed_ him.

As much as Eddie wants to fall into that, to be reborn in this world where Buck loves him—wants _him_ —he stops himself. Yes, Buck had kissed him, but Buck had also been slightly high on painkillers and riding the crest of emotional vulnerability, and there’s still a part of Eddie that thinks he should have pulled away instead of parting his lips gently, put space in between them instead of grabbing onto Buck’s hand as he fell asleep, instead of continuing to take up his space. 

Still—Buck had kissed him, and the gentleness of it had left the impression that it wasn’t the first time Buck had considered doing so—it was just the first time he had allowed his guard to come down enough for it to happen. 

Buck had kissed him, and Eddie had parted his lips and kissed him back, had heard the quiet contentment in his breath before he had fallen asleep, had taken Buck’s hand and laced their fingers together, had laid there still because he’s not sure if he should move, until eventually, he fell asleep.

It seems like almost no time has passed when he wakes to the beeping alarm, rolling onto his back and flinging his arm out to turn it off, bringing his phone close to his face to read the text from Hen that offers to keep Christopher for the night. He’s still so exhausted from his shift, from weeks of watching over Chris _and_ Buck that all he wants to do is fall back asleep, but—

—Buck is awake, looking down at their joined hands. 

Eddie’s heart is in his throat while Buck stares at them, and the prayer on his tongue gets lost on the way to his lips when Buck slowly pulls his hand away and looks up, eyes searching out Eddie’s face. He’s not sure what Buck sees—all he feels is a jumbled mess of emotions; apprehension and yearning laced with the sharp, bitter certainty that this will not work out for him like he so desperately wants—but after a moment, Buck reaches up and touches his fingertips to Eddie’s cheek, thumb resting just under Eddie’s bottom lip, and all Eddie can do is wait, to lay there and hope that whatever Buck sees, whatever he _feels_ —that will be enough.

When Buck says his name it’s in a quiet, reverential tone, and Eddie is helpless to do anything _but_ move his hand to the back of Buck’s neck and pull him in, to hesitantly press his mouth against Buck’s and part his lips. They’re not so much kissing as breathing together, until Buck’s hand slides up and his palm presses flat to Eddie’s cheek, and then his mouth is moving against Buck’s and he’s scratching fingers through his hair as Buck makes quiet, gasping exhalations that send Eddie’s heart racing. 

When he finally pulls back, it’s just to lean his forehead against Buck’s, stealing small, chaste kisses as Buck’s fingers brush over his skin, curl into his neck to pull him close again. “Eddie,” Buck breathes out against his lips, “you have no idea—I wanted to do that for so long—I didn’t think—”

“Wait,” he says, pulling back further so he can actually look at Buck, nearly losing his train of thought at Buck’s bright eyes, his flushed cheeks and pink lips. “Long? How—how long is so long? This isn’t—”

“Recent?” Buck fills in when he trails off, unsure of what to say. “No, it’s not—well, I didn’t think _you_ were interested until recently but I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining things or if maybe you were just being more … affectionate because I was and you felt guilty still, but—no, Eddie. It’s not recent.”

There are so many things he wants to ask—exactly what made Buck think he was interested? How the hell did he work up the nerve to kiss Eddie if he wasn’t sure he was imagining it? And how long, exactly, was _so long_?—but what comes out is, “but you were dating Ali,” which is not something he cares about even a little.

The corner of Buck’s mouth crooks up and he leans in and presses a kiss to Eddie’s mouth, then another, until Eddie is breathless with it and Buck is nearly on top of him, knee resting on Eddie’s thigh and hands on his sides. “I couldn’t listen to Chim and Hen teasing me about my crush on you anymore,” he says finally, and Eddie balls the blanket up under his hand so he doesn’t pull until Buck’s body covers his completely. “They’re gonna have a field day when they find out about this—not that they have to right away, just—whenever we tell them. If. I’m okay with just taking Chris and running away to start a new life.”

If there was some remaining tension lingering, it’s soothed by the undercurrent of anxiety in Buck’s voice. Eddie’s spent so long feeling like he was alone in this that knowing Buck is worried, too—it actually makes him feel better. “I’m not—hiding, Buck, we can tell them whenever. Maybe we can wait until after we actually have a date though, you know, so you can make sure there’s a spark.”

He’s teasing, but Buck shakes his head and kisses him again, something Eddie doesn’t think he’ll ever grow tired of it. “Don’t need a spark,” he says, and Eddie feels Buck’s hands run up his sides, “you’re the whole damn fire, Eds.”

“Still,” he says, and Buck shakes his head.

“I’ll wait as long as you want,” Buck says, “but I feel like you’re just waiting for me to change my mind and it’s not going to happen. This isn’t just some—fling, Eddie. You’re not that person to me.”

They don’t make it out of bed until much later when, face flushed and lips swollen, Buck shifts on top of him and Eddie hears the quick intake of a painful breath. “Just a cramp,” Buck says, and Eddie rolls him onto the bed and reaches for his leg, helping him stretch it out. 

“You need some water,” Eddie says, glancing at his alarm clock, “and we both need dinner. You need some Tylenol or anything?”

“Nah,” Buck says, but Eddie can see he’s being more careful when he gets out of bed, holds all his weight on his right side for a moment before shifting it over. “You want me to make something? Chris and I went grocery shopping while you were on shift so we’re stocked up.”

“I’ll make it, you don’t need to overwork yourself,” he says, and hovers in the doorway until Buck stops walking so tentatively on his bad leg. 

“So, sandwiches,” Buck says, grinning, and he nudges Eddie with his shoulder as he passes. 

It’s not until he’s sliding the tray of bacon into the oven and tossing bags of deli meat on the counter that he realizes that all the things he’s only ever done in his daydreams—he can do them now. So he leaves the food half-made and moves to where Buck is sitting on the counter, licking at a spoonful of peanut butter, and kisses him. 

Buck pulls him in immediately, dropping the spoon next to him as he traps Eddie between his thighs, hands curled around his waist while Eddie learns to read him in entirely new ways; the stroke of Buck’s thumbs underneath his ribs, the small, pleased hum in the back of his throat, his stubbled jaw against Eddie’s lips, the feel of Buck’s thighs tensing under his palms. He’s always thought he understood Buck—that he knew what he needed with a glance, could hear what Buck broadcast with his body language, but Buck had said he wanted this for so long and Eddie had clearly not caught on. 

“How long?” he asks, breaking away, thumbs tracing patterns against the sweatpants that cover Buck’s thighs. “You didn’t tell me, earlier.”

Buck shrugs, reaches for the abandoned spoon and pops it back in his mouth before he answers, mouth thick with peanut butter. “Maybe since the earthquake,” he says after a moment. “I don’t really know, I just felt like—you guys are my family, you and Chris. I’m not really sure when I realized I wanted it to be more, it just feels like I’ve always felt—something—for you.” He licks the spoon again, kisses Eddie with sticky lips, and says, “why, how long for you?”

Eddie probably should have seen that question coming. He makes an inarticulate noise, stalling for time, thankful when the oven timer goes off and he can move away while he frantically tries to think of an answer that sounds like the truth but—isn’t. 

“Awhile,” is what he settles on, making a face at himself as he moves the bacon from the tray to a stack of paper towels to blot the grease off. “You’re just—good with Chris, and you kept helping me with everything I needed like it was no big deal—”

“It wasn’t,” Buck says, catching the avocado that Eddie tosses at him and hopping off the counter. “I just happened to know Carla, you’re giving me too much credit for that. And anything else—you’re my best friend, Eddie, okay? I’d do anything for you. Whether or not this ever happened, you were already kinda stuck with me.” Buck bumps his hip as he stands next to him, cutting avocado slices and placing them onto the sandwiches Eddie had assembled. “Gotta say, I prefer being able to kiss you, though.”

“Yeah, it’s not so bad,” Eddie says. “A little frustrating to think that it could have been happening for longer, though.”

“We’ll just make up for all that time,” Buck says, and Eddie’s not at all surprised when Buck drops everything in his hands and reaches out for him. 

“Pretty sure this is not considered taking it easy,” Eddie pants, upending the bottle over his head until the cool water trickles down his face. “How’s your leg holding up?”

“It’s great,” Buck says, “it’s my side that’s the problem.” He’s got the heel of his hand pressed against it, grimacing. “Didn’t realize I was this outta shape. Maybe we should come back tomorrow—”

“You have PT tomorrow, you’re not coming back here, especially by yourself,” Eddie says. It’s been a struggle to get Buck to slow down; ever since he scheduled his recertification test, he’s been going non-stop. Eddie’s been following along for the sole purpose of pulling him back, and it’s probably a good thing that Buck kissed him when he did, because the only distraction that really seems to work is telling him to save his energy for the bedroom. 

Eddie’s not complaining. 

“It’s my last appointment,” Buck says, rubbing his side. “I’ve only got three weeks, Eddie, I need to pass it the first time.”

“You’ll pass,” he says. “We’ll work on your cardio some more, just—not at noon outside, Jesus. Come on, I think I’ve got some towels in the car, once we get down there we can clean up the best we can and go get some burgers or something for lunch.”

Buck stands up, stretching his arms over his head, and although he’s been shirtless the whole time all Eddie can think about is pushing him up against the boulder behind him and licking all the sweat off his abs. Buck must see it in his face, because in the blink of an eye he’s in front of Eddie, hands on Eddie’s hips. “Maybe we could explore a little,” he says, ducking his head down and pulling Eddie’s bottom lip between his teeth. 

“Great idea, get back in shape only to get us both fired for breaking the code of conduct when we’re caught,” Eddie says, pushing him away. “Come on, I have to pick Chris up at his friends by dinner so if you want to have any time to ourselves, we gotta make it back to my place in less than two hours. I still need to go to the grocery store today.”

His place—because Buck had moved back into his own apartment shortly after they’d gotten together, which Eddie … hated. Eight weeks of having Buck living with him and a week of sleeping in the same bed together had gotten him used to having Buck around all the time, and now his room was back to feeling too quiet, too lonely at night, and he’s pretty sure they’re actually getting less sleep now that half their nights are spent on the phone. But they’d wanted to keep this thing between them quiet, for now, and Hen and Chim were already giving Eddie weird looks when he would mention something that made it clear Buck was still staying at his place, and Maddie had been taking it as evidence that Buck wasn’t doing as well as he said he was, so Buck had packed up the surprising amount of things that he’d accumulated over the weeks and went back home.

“Hey, you know what tomorrow is,” Buck says when they’re halfway down, slightly out of breath from running, “Friday. We should take Chris out, it’s been awhile. Maybe to the pier.”

“Friday’s are supposed to be cheap,” Eddie says, dropping behind Buck as someone coming up the trail comes closer.

“The pier is free!” Buck protests—the effect is lost with the way he skitters on a patch of loose rock, throwing his arm up in the air to maintain his balance. “I’m good, I’m good.”

“You show me an eight year old who will be happy ignoring the rides, midway games, and mountains of junk food, and I’ll take that one to the pier with you,” Eddie says. “You can take Chris to the pier some other time.”

“Look at all the seagulls!” Chris says, lifting his arm off Eddie’s shoulder and pointing at the outcropping of rocks, appearing white-tipped with all the birds gathered on top. “Do you think anyone cleans off the poop?”

“Don’t think so, buddy,” Buck says, laughing. “Some of it might wash off when we get rain, but I bet there’s like, _inches_ of bird poop on top of there.”

Chris laughs so hard he snorts, and Eddie shakes his head in disgust. They’d finally settled on El Matador beach—a longer drive than usual, but free, especially since he’d talked Buck into bringing a picnic instead of going out before—or so he thought until they spread out a blanket once they got onto the sand and Buck pulled his backpack open. 

“Cake!” Chris shouts, and Buck snatches it away, hiding it behind his back.

“Not until after dinner,” he says, pulling out a handful of wrapped packages, several deli containers, a loaf of bread, and a handful of utensils to drop in the middle of their circle. Eddie recognizes the dolmas that Buck’s brought to work a few times and the pea salad that Chris loves, but some of the other containers are unfamiliar, and he opens them up to peer at the contents. 

“Figs stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped with prosciutto, tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, peppers stuffed with feta and chive,” Buck says, pointing to each container in turn, “and some sliced sausages and cheeses. Don’t worry, Chris,” he adds, winking as he pulls out a foil wrapped sandwich, “turkey and mayo, no fancy stuff.”

God, Eddie wants to kiss him, but they hadn’t talked to Chris about the change in their relationship yet—they could have, but there was a certain thrill in the idea of sneaking around, and they’d stuck with their decision to go on a date before letting anyone know, Christopher included. He settles for spearing a ball of mozzarella on his fork and holding it out for Buck to eat, wishing he could at least lean against him, touch him somehow.

“No olive bread, right?” Chris asks, eyeing the spread of food in front of them before taking the sandwich.

“Just raisins,” Buck says. “I’ve got some chips in here for you, too, buddy, but I think you should try some of this first.”

“One bite of each if you want the chips,” Eddie says, and adds, “you can skip the dolmas, I know you don’t like them.”

They eat slowly, and Eddie lets Chris take off to see some of the tide pools on his own while he and Buck finish, taking the chance to sit too close and intertwine their fingers while Buck worries aloud about his recertification test for the hundredth time since scheduling it. Eddie lets him list all the work he needs to put in at the gym while he cleans everything up, then shoves Buck backwards onto the sand and digs his fingers into Buck’s ribs until he’s laughing too hard to keep talking. 

Chris keeps them busy with photo opportunities—perched up on both of their shoulders, carefully shot photos that seem to show him climbing up the rocks, squeezing underneath some of the arches—and exploring the tide pools, reeling off a list of animals that live in them, counting the number of barnacles on a rock, and trying to talk Eddie into taking a hermit crab home. 

They spend nearly two hours on the beach before Buck suggests they have cake, and he tells Chris he has one more surprise for him. “I thought I would put this on my channel if you liked it,” he says, pulling out a book as Chris settles into Eddie’s lap and digs into his slice of chocolate cake. “Do you remember the alligator book we read at the station? It’s by the same author. It’s called _If You Ever Want to Bring a Piano to the Beach, Don’t_.” He presses himself close to Eddie—so close that Eddie’s not sure how he’s going to manage to hold the book—and opens it up. “If your mom says to get ready to play at the beach,” he reads dramatically, “she means with a boat, or a frisbee, or a shovel. She is NOT talking about the piano.”

Sitting there—his son on his lap, Buck beside them—it feels right, and if Eddie pulls one of his arms from around Chris to wrap discreetly around Buck’s waist, well—no one but Buck has to know. 


	10. (untitled)

He wakes up in the morning to eighty-seven text messages, all from Buck. He scrolls all the way up to where they’d said goodnight—at 9:03pm, so Buck could be well-rested for his recertification—and starts to read, noting that the biggest break of time is no more than an hour and ten minutes.

Buck’s going to be dead on his feet by the time his test is done.

He wonders, when his phone rings a moment later, if Buck had been staring at his phone, waiting for 6:00am to tick over to 6:01am, and he barely gets out a hello before Buck’s talking, a litany of worries about his personal fitness—”the stair climber is set to sixty steps a minute; I’ve been doing seventy and going for five minutes but—”, “I’m not worried about the hose drag but what if I trip and drop the power tools? You know that’s happened out on calls, remember the one with the dude who threatened to kill the guy that hit his car with the jaws? God, if I drop them I fail the whole thing right there—”, “Remember that time Chim accidentally lost control of the halyard while he was raising the ladder when we were trying to get those teenagers off the roof? That’s an immediate fail, Eddie—”

“Take a breath,” Eddie finally interrupts, and it’s really too early to deal with all this. “Buck, you passed your original certification the first time, you’ll pass it again. Unless you end up falling asleep when you go to take a knee on the hose pull, though.”

“Funny,” Buck mutters over the line. “I couldn’t sleep. I tried.”

Eddie doubts he tried very hard, given all the texts he was sending. “Have you eaten?”

“I had a, uh, protein … drink,” Buck hedges, and Eddie narrows his eyes.

“You need to drink something other than coffee,” he says, because he doesn’t need a translator for Buck’s particular brand of avoidance, “and eat actual food. You want me to bring you something? I can get Chris up.”

“No,” Buck says; Eddie hears the wistfulness in his tone and almost rolls out of bed right then. “I’m supposed to meet Maddie for breakfast in ten, she’ll force me to eat something. Can I come over after?”

“What, you need an invitation now? Three days ago you woke me up before sunrise because you were bored, but coming over at a reasonable time is something you need permission for?”

“Eddie,” Buck laughs, “I’m asking—you know, in case it goes well—”

“Which it _will_.”

“—which I hope it does,” Buck continues as if Eddie hadn’t said anything at all, “can I come over to, ah—”

Eddie shakes his head, smiling even though Buck can’t see him. “Chris is spending today with abuela,” he says. He can practically feel Buck brighten at that over the phone. “I figured you’d be hungry, we could get some lunch to celebrate—”

“Fuck _lunch_ ,” Buck says, and Eddie laughs.

“I was hoping it’d be me, but I guess if that’s your new thing—”

“I’m hanging up on you,” Buck says, and the line goes dead. Eddie doesn’t bother setting the phone aside yet; a few seconds later his phone buzzes with a text, a picture of Buck flipping him off, and he’s in the middle of typing up a reply when he gets a second picture, of Buck laying in bed, fingers creeping under the waistband of his sweats, the accompanying text reading _looking forward to lunch_.

Eddie snorts with laughter, deletes the picture reluctantly because Chris still uses his phone to send texts at times, and gets out of bed. He’s got a few hours; he doubts Buck will be over before noon, so he takes his time in shuffling Chris, moving slow as molasses, through his morning routine, doing laundry and cleaning leftovers out of the refrigerator. He tells Chris that he’s going to help set up Buck’s surprise party, knowing that if Chris heard Buck was coming over he would never want to leave, drops him off with abuela and goes back home to wait.

And wait.

And wait, until he couldn’t handle glancing at the clock anymore and wondering, imagining scenarios where Buck had failed, where he’d gone back home to bury himself in blankets and sorrow, scenarios where he’d passed but had found something better to do than spend his time with Eddie, where the knowledge that he gets to go back to work is enough to lift his spirits and make him realize that this thing with Eddie was just a way to—

The door nearly crashes open in the middle of Eddie’s downward spiral, unset message to Hen to see if she’d heard from Buck tapped out on his phone, and Buck’s beaming grin is suddenly in his face, hands pressing him back against the couch as Buck straddles him. “I passed,” Buck says, and sits back, smugness exuding from his voice when he says, “set a new record, too.”

“Knew you would,” Eddie says, breath catching when Buck leans in and kisses his neck, the knot in his stomach dissipating with every press of Buck’s lips, with the scrape of his teeth against Eddie’s skin, lightness floating up from his skin with the gentle sweep of Buck’s fingers. “So. Lunch?”

“Hey,” he says into the phone, badly suppressing a sigh. “Look, I tried to give you space but—Chris misses you, Buck, can you just—” he can’t say it, can’t utter the phrase _please call me_ again, the words wearing out welcome on his tongue. He sighs instead, looks around the empty living room, and makes a decision. “Fuck it,” he says, and ends the call.

He’d tried space. He’d been at the hospital when Buck was released the morning after the party, a set of clean clothes in his hands, had told Buck to call him after he’d seen his own doctor, after he’d figured out the next steps, had gone home and tried to wash the memory of Buck choking on blood out of his mind.

Buck hadn’t called. 

Eddie, instead, had gotten the news about blood thinners and extended leave from Bobby, who had seemed almost relieved that Buck wasn’t going to be running around the station any time soon. Eddie gets it, he does—he still thinks Buck was pushing himself too hard during his recovery, and he thinks the extended downtime might be good. Buck still has department mandated therapy to complete, still gets aches in his leg that he can’t shake out, still wakes up gasping with nightmares and covered in sweat. Eddie trusts him more than anyone, but he’s not ready to be in the situation where he has to choose between taking care of Buck or doing his job because Buck came back to work before his body was ready.

So he grabs his keys, drops Chris off at abuela’s with a promise to pick him up before dinner, and heads to Buck’s apartment. Knocking gets him nowhere, so he uses his key, surveys the mess of takeout containers stacked up on the coffee table, and heads up the stairs, where a Buck-shaped lump is under the covers.

“Get up,” he says, grabbing the corner and yanking the comforter back. Buck groans and rolls over, dragging the blanket back with him, but Eddie’s got an eight-year old at home and is well aware that his persistence will eventually wear Buck down. “Enough moping. Get up. This place is filthy, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t showered since you left the hospital.”

“Fuck off,” Buck says. He doesn’t bother trying to get the comforter back over his head when Eddie grabs it again, but yanks it up to cover most of his body. “Go away.”

“Really mature,” Eddie says, and sits down on the bed. “Come on, Buck. It’s a set-back, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“They don’t know if I can work again,” Buck finally says, the words muffled by the stack of pillows he has his face buried in. “I’m on blood thinners but it’s just a waiting game until the screws come out. I can’t—I need to work, Eddie. I can’t lose that.”

He rests his hand where he thinks Buck’s arm is, buried under a comforter too thick for the middle of August despite the cool air blowing relentlessly from the vents in the ceiling. “There are other things you can do,” he offers. Just because Buck doesn’t want to hear it doesn’t mean he shouldn't; Eddie knows him, knows he’s probably spent the last three days moping around and considering his entire life wasted if there’s no prospect of rushing into burning buildings, but there are other ways of helping people in the world. 

Buck turns his head to the side and regards Eddie with a flat, emotionless look. “Yeah, the communications degree I got because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing with my life will really get me far,” he says.

“We’ll figure something out if it gets to that point,” Eddie says, and—he’s not expecting Buck to fall at his feet or anything, maybe just a look, something that tells Eddie that Buck will be okay—the disbelieving, cold look that Buck levels at him, though—

“You don’t get it,” Buck says, and he turns and sits up as the hard look settles on his face, all angles and sharp lines and none of the softness that Eddie has come to expect of him. The way Buck looks at him makes his heart drop to his stomach, puts him on edge, sets him into professional mode, like he’s going to have to talk someone down off the ledge at any moment. “This isn’t just a job, it’s my life. It’s the only thing that matters.”

If Buck had—really _looked_ at him, made a noise that indicated he knew he crossed a line, pulled in an apologetic breath— _anything_ other than stared directly at Eddie without moving, Eddie could have … dealt with it. He could have managed to keep talking about it, to get to what Buck really meant, to push down his own shattered heart to put back together later while he soothed Buck. But Buck looks at him like he can’t believe Eddie still has the audacity to be sitting there on the edge of his bed, like looking away would be a sign of weakness he can’t bear to show, and Eddie’s on his feet and moving to the stairs before he really knows what’s happening, his lungs tight as his heart thuds in his chest painfully.

He tries, at the top of the stairs; turns back around and looks at Buck, searches for hurt or sadness in his face and finds none, just a clenched jaw and tightness around Buck’s eyes that scream at Eddie to leave. 

So Eddie does. 

He makes it home without knowing how he got there, the drive passing in the blink of an eye, unable to remember which route he took or if he even considered picking Chris up from abuela’s along the way. He isn’t aware of anything until he’s standing in the middle of his living room, staring into an empty room that’s too full of Buck and memories of Buck for him to stay in, but there’s nowhere for him to go, because Buck permeates every room in his house. There’s nothing here that’s free of memory; the kitchen counter Buck had sat on while he wrapped his legs around Eddie and kissed him, the bathroom they’d showered in together, the spot next to Christopher’s bed where he would sit, book in hand to read to him. 

Eddie can’t get away from Buck no matter where he goes. 

He doesn’t even know where he went wrong this time. He could pinpoint it with Shannon; they weren’t right for each other in the beginning, but he’d been young and determined to make it work, stuck on his parent’s idea of what the right thing was, had known he was fucking up the entire time. But Buck—he thought it was different. Buck had said “you won’t always care,” and Eddie had rejected that notion, because he _does_ care, he’ll always care, and—

—and the worst part is, Eddie had been _trying_ this time. He wasn’t drifting around El Paso, seeing ghosts every time he closed his eyes, biting his tongue so he didn’t jump at sudden noises, wasn’t starting every day reminding himself he was back home before he even opened his eyes like it was all part of a bad dream. The worst part is that before Buck had cut him down in a few words was that Eddie would have bet everything he had that Buck would fall back on him if things went bad, that Buck would bury himself in _Eddie_ , and instead, Eddie had once again been carefully considered and found to be lacking. 

On the first Friday, Eddie tells Chris that Buck still needs to rest at home, puts on a movie, and tries to ignore the hollow feeling in his chest that he gets every time he looks over at Buck’s empty side of the couch. On the second, he distracts him with the invitation of a sleepover from one of his school friends, drives himself around until he’s in a part of town he’s never been in, free of memories, sits and watches the Dodgers play on television while his bottle of beer grows warm on the bartop. On the third, he takes Chris to the pier out of spite, lets him stuff himself full of junk food and feels like a shitty father when Chris is bent over a trash can two minutes after getting off a spinning ride, throwing up. They ride the ferris wheel three times, and when Chris asks to watch one of Buck’s videos at bed, Eddie hands him the tablet, gives him a kiss, and leaves the room.

The night before the fourth Friday, Chris looks over at him at dinner and asks, “why are you and Buck fighting?”

“We’re—” he says, and falters. He can’t hide the fact that Buck hasn’t been around, that they haven’t been talking, but he’s not exactly sure what to say. One of the worst parts of the last month is that everything Eddie’s feeling has been carefully tucked away, hidden from everyone, because what’s he supposed to say? No one had known they were together, so he can’t exactly explain his feelings or reclusive behavior away with the news of their break-up. “Buck—”

“He said he couldn’t come over unless I asked you,” Chris continues, and Eddie stops with his fork lifted halfway to his mouth.

“Bring me your tablet,” he says, and when Chris gives him a weird look upon his return, placing it at Eddie’s elbow, Eddie has close his eyes and breath against what he sees, what has to be hundreds of messages between the two of them: Chris’ inane chatter about his day, rife with misspellings that make it clear he’d been using speech-to-text, pictures of his drawings and Lego creations, indications of voice messages sent and received. 

But it’s Buck’s responses that make his chest grow tighter; reassurances that he loves Chris, praises for his drawings, suggestions of books that Chris should get from the library, and there, after Chris had invited him over: _I will if it’s okay with your dad_.

He thinks he probably sits there for too long, feeling the bitter sting of being unwanted slowly growing until it threatens to choke him. Chris doesn’t ask again, which Eddie is grateful for, because he’s still not entirely sure how to tell his kid that once again, he’s not good enough to keep around. An hour later, when Chris grabs one of his new library books and flops into one of the patio chairs on the deck, he gives in and calls Buck.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear from me,” he says, trying not to let the slow burn of hurt he feels show in his voice as he leaves a message, “but Chris wants to see you, so if you can come over tomorrow, I can make up a reason to leave. Just let me know.”

Buck calls back almost immediately. “I can pick him up and take him somewhere,” he says, and Eddie nods stiffly before he remembers that Buck can’t see him.

“That’s fine.”

There’s a pause, and then, “Can I take him out to dinner?”

The ache that blooms in his chest makes responding difficult; he’s glad—relieved, really—that Buck isn’t ignoring Chris. Chris loves Buck, and no matter how hurt Eddie is, he’s not petty enough to keep his kid away from someone that means that much to him. But there had been a part of him that had held onto that as a lift raft, a part of him that thought Buck was still just in pain, that he was avoiding everything as he sunk into a depressive episode and that at some point, he would come back to Eddie.

The realization that it’s just _Eddie_ he’s avoiding hurts so bad it makes him want to hit something.

“Fine,” he says. He can’t manage any more than that, a sting of tears already pushing at the corners of his eyes. “Tell me when, I’ll have him ready.”

“Can I—is four okay? If—”

“It’s fine,” Eddie says. “He’ll see you then.” He hangs up without another word, drops his phone on the table, and closes his eyes. 

Fuck, he’s so stupid. He should have known—he _did_ know, knew he wasn’t good enough and still fucking jumped at the chance, made it an entire month before crashing and burning spectacularly. He should have never let it get that far, should have pulled back when his feelings for Buck started getting a little too real, should have transferred stations the second he saw Buck’s face that first morning. He could have lived without knowing him, could have managed the rest of his life as it had been, could have been happy just having Chris if he had never met Buck. He wishes for a moment, bitterly, that he’d chosen Chicago instead of Los Angeles. He tries telling himself that at least Chris is happier, that Chris deserves someone who loves him like Buck does, but it only succeeds in making him feel like a terrible father, one who can’t even set aside his own feelings to be happy for his son.

He stays at the table, head in his hands, until he hears the back door open and Chris come in, pushing against him for a hug. “It’s okay, Dad,” Chris says quietly, and Eddie bites down on his tongue and prays the tears stay in his eyes. “Can you read me a chapter?”

“Yeah,” he says, and scoops Chris up as he stands, gratefully taking all the love and kindness his son offers him. He carries him down the hall and lets him down at the bathroom to brush his teeth, changes his own clothes before stretching out on Chris’ bed and waits for him to climb in. 

“I’m sorry for asking Buck to come over,” Chris says as he snuggles in, and Eddie uses the hand he has on Chris’ hip to flip him around so they’re facing each other. 

“You don’t have to be sorry about that,” he says, watching Chris’ face carefully. “Buck loves you, Chris, I’m not upset with you for talking to him. He’s going to come over tomorrow and pick you up, you guys can spend some time together. I know you miss him.”

He’s always thought Chris looks younger without his glasses, but he looks younger still when he frowns at Eddie and says, “you’re not going to come with?”

“No,” he says, and he knows without a doubt that he’s not getting out of the conversation this time, so he takes a deep breath and tries to explain in the only way he knows how. “Sometimes—sometimes when you have friends, buddy, you just—you don’t always talk to them. You don’t always stay friends, okay? And Buck—” he doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to explain to a child that all he’d been was a distraction while Buck was waiting to get his job back. 

“Will Buck stop being friends with me, too?”

“No,” he says immediately, pushing Chris’ hair back from his forehead. Seeing their texts had confirmed that if there’s anything he’s still sure of when it comes to Buck, it’s that. “I know he’s your best friend,” he says, and this part, at least, is easier, “but he loves you like I do, as much as I do. I don’t think there’s anything in the world that would stop him from talking to you.”

“Just you,” Chris says, tucking his head under Eddie’s chin and yawning.

“I’d never want that,” Eddie says, trying like hell to mean it. It’d be easier if Chris didn’t love Buck so much, but he does, and Eddie’s not about to take that from him. “It doesn’t matter if Buck and I aren’t friends, Chris. He’ll always be yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm _really_ sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me to update this @ [hearteyesforbuck](http://hearteyesforbuck.tumblr.com).
> 
> Books read by Buck (links to YT):
> 
> [Where the Wild Things Are](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALmNPxNehYE) by Maurice Sendak  
> [Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwrA4UHL9_0) by Matt de la Pena  
> [Dragons Love Tacos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMTCZZp3RbQ) by Adam Rubin  
> [Penguin Problems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAH6Yf7bu58) by Jory John  
> [Nightsong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L83Kz_LLCEM) by Ari Berk  
> [If You Want to Bring an Alligator to School, Don't](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWBv3tRipIo) by Elise Parsley  
> [Wherever You Are, My Love Will Find You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdMJr9UD4fI) by Nancy Tillman  
> [Crankenstein](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WobraIUvsg) by Samantha Berger  
> [Cry, Heart, But Never Break](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNSKMeHFHFQ) by Glenn Ringtved  
> [Just In Case You Want To Fly by Julia Fogliano](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFKVw8f2zNE)  
> [I Knew You Could by Craig Dorfman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4AZ_gwXTrA&t=133s)


End file.
